


Where Angels Dream

by AthenasAspis (agentandromeda)



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Borderlands Lore, Canon-Typical Violence, Eridians, Gen, Helios - Freeform, Jack is a Bad Dad, Original Character(s), Pandora - Freeform, Tim is a good bro, eventual Gaige/Angel, eventual Rhys/Tim, lots and lots of background characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-05-14 05:26:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 21,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14763473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agentandromeda/pseuds/AthenasAspis
Summary: Angel is imprisoned, and she'll do anything to escape.Timothy is trapped in a life he doesn't want.Together, they escape Hyperion and embark on a journey to the ancient Eridian citadel of Talos, a place of treasure and freedom. But Pandora is an unforgiving place, and if they're going to survive, Angel will have to understand what it really means to be a Siren. And Timothy's going to have to get a lot better with guns.





	1. In Which Timothy Resigns (Kind Of)

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfic will have some relationships, as mentioned in the tags, but they are not the focus or the endgame; the plot works fine without them. This fic is focused on the storyline, the lore of the Borderlands universe, and characters I thought deserved better.
> 
> We open on a floating city, where Lilith has tracked down the first of Jack's vault hunters. (In other words, this takes place before the opening scene of the Pre-Sequel)

__

SANCTUARY

“So.”  
Lilith’s footsteps thudded dully on the concrete as she paced back and forth.  
“You two have quite the price on your heads.”  
She turned to face them with military precision, fixing her gaze on Tim. He flinched involuntarily. He was no stranger to scary looks, but the Firehawk’s wrath was legendary. Even now, as she stood confidently before her prisoners, a fiery light still smoldered in her eyes.  
“You,” she continued, “have a bit of a pathetic history. Signed your body and life away to pay off student loans, then continued to be Handsome Jack’s bitch for two years. Then you kidnap his Siren hacker and go AWOL, before coming here and trying to steal our stuff.”

“I like that stuff,” the tall hunk of muscle, whom Angel had called Brick, interjected.

“He didn’t kidnap me,” Angel interrupted. “He r—“

“I’ll get to you later,” Lilith snapped. She turned back to Tim.  
“Not to mention the fiasco at Prosperity Junction, teaming up with anarchists in Liberty Valley, and your role in the fall of New Haven. That was all after you helped Handsome Jack open a vault, almost dooming us all.” She turned to Angel.  
“And you’re the one who tricked us into bringing Jack to power with the promise of loot. You’ve been helping him with espionage for countless years. You even let him make an AI of you, which continued to trick and betray us, leading directly to the death of my boyfriend.”

“And my bird,” added the scrawny Hermean sniper wrapped in red fabric. Angel stayed silent, waiting.

“So,” Lilith continued, “you two have some explaining to do. I just have one question.” She pinned them with her fiery gaze like two moths to a specimen board. “Why?” Timothy and Angel looked at each other. 

“Well,” Timothy began, “it’s a bit of a long story…”

HELIOS

“Jack, I quit.” 

Timothy stared down the poster outside the office door and shook his head. 

“No, no, too confrontational, he’ll kill you. Um, how about, I’d like to turn in my resignation. Consider this my two weeks. I’d like to move on to better things.”  
The cocky look in the poster’s eyes made him uneasy. Timothy took a deep breath. 

“Er, maybe, I’m out. I didn’t sign up for this. I don’t look like you anymore. I got an offer from Tediore’s engineering division.” 

He had gotten no such offer. He looked down at his shaking hands. He remembered how Athena had left, just turned on her heel and walked straight out of Eleseer, and wished he’d had the courage to act on his desire to follow her away from this madness. He stared the poster down, gazing into the eyes of the new face of Hyperion. “I’d like to turn in my resignation.”

“Good luck with that,” someone snickered. 

Timothy shrieked and turned around. Nisha leaned against the empty desk where a CL4P-TP had worked only two days before. All the small robots had recently disappeared from Helios, and while Timothy fully supported this turn of events, he couldn’t help but wonder what it meant for other Hyperion assets. Like him. 

“Nisha. Oh. Hi,” he gasped out. She smirked and tipped her hat. Something sinister lurked in her smile. She already sported a brand-new coat, complete with a shining silver star. Timothy pitied the poor bastards who had the misfortune to live in Lynchwood. 

“So, you’re resigning, huh,” she drawled. She drew herself up and walked over to him, inspecting his face, and snorted. “Pity. You’ve got a nice face.” She shrugged. “Sucks to be you, I guess.”

“You don’t understand,” he told her. “You love this stuff. You’re getting exactly what you want. This,” he gestured around the antechamber, “is in no way what I want. I don’t want to fight bandits as a walking billboard for the rest of my life.” 

Nisha raised an eyebrow.

“You’re good at it, though,” she said. 

He glared at her.  
“No, I’m serious. You can still change your mind. Jack probably won’t kill ya if you don’t resign. I’m gonna be needing a deputy, you know.” 

Chills ran down Timothy’s spine. Was he really the kind of guy that a psycho cop wanted to deputize? He was good at killing bandits, but it was self-defense. It was all self-defense. He hadn’t killed that helpless Dahl soldier, after all…well, he had sent a helpless Dahl soldier hurtling towards Elpis to his death. Was he a bad person? He shook his head. 

“My mind is made up.” 

“It’s your funeral.” 

Timothy turned to the door and took a deep, shuddering breath. He rapped his knuckles three times on the smooth metal surface, and the doors slid open. He couldn’t look away from his feet as he shuffled up the torturously long walkway to Jack’s desk. 

“I told you, Jack” Jack snapped, not looking up from the pile of papers on his desk, “I don’t have work for you right now. Give me two days and I’ll know where you fit in into the company. Don’t worry,” he chuckled, “you’ll have a place.”

“My name is Timothy. It’s not Jack.” Abort. Abort. This was not the plan. This was not the script he had rehearsed, but now he couldn’t stop. Jack looked up in surprise. Timothy slammed both palms down on the desk and stared straight into Jack’s eyes. “And I’m leaving.” Jack raised one masked eyebrow. 

“Well, finally, my double-d’s growing some goddamn balls. Kinda sad that it took kicking that three-faced weirdo’s ass to do it, though.” 

That was not the response Timothy had been expecting, but it wasn’t a shotgun to the face, which was good. He drew himself back up to his full height, which was exactly the same as Jack’s. 

“I’m going to take a pod down to Elpis, and then I’m gone.”

“Not so fast, pumpkin.” Jack rummaged for something in his desk, and Timothy took a step back, feeling tremors return to his hands. “Body doubles ain’t cheap, you know.”

“I’m not your body double anymore,” Timothy told him, hating the way his speech tripped over consonants like they were stumbling through darkness. “I mean, you’ve got, uh…”

“I’ve got what, exactly?” Jack asked, in a voice filled with silk and danger.

“I just mean, um, no one’s going to mistake me for you.” 

Jack chuckled, “Hey, masks are cheaper than body doubles.” 

Timothy took two more steps back as he realized exactly what Jack was suggesting. If he had a list of things he wanted, a mask permanently attached to his face would have been near the bottom, somewhere above living on the top floor of a skyscraper and hiring a full-time clown to announce his every entrance and exit.

“What? No. No. I am not wearing some creepy skin face. I’m out! I’m done! I didn’t sign up for any of this! I don’t want a face on my face!” 

“Oh, don’t worry, cupcake. I’ll take care of that. Face it. Haha, wait did you see what I did there? Face it? Classic. Anyway, what was I saying? Right. With my face, all the ladies practically fall over themselves for you. Don’t you want to keep that?”

“Doesn’t matter what I want,” Tim growled. “It’s irreversible. And your face without the mask is fine. I’ll still have it. There’s nothing you can say to change my mind. I don’t want a mask, and I don’t want this job, Jack!” Timothy was yelling now, and was aware and embarrassed that his voice sounded like he was on the verge of collapsing into hysterics. Jack walked out from behind the desk.

“All right, just one thing.”

“W-what?”

“It’s Handsome Jack.” 

And suddenly, Timothy was against the wall, with Jack’s hand around his throat. He couldn’t breathe. Jack’s hand pressed against his throat, and he could almost feel his airways closing. He slapped at Jack’s arm, but the man was ruthlessly strong—too strong. How could he, a bitch-ass programmer, hold up a vault hunter his own weight by the neck with one hand? Timothy stared, wide-eyed, at Jack’s other hand, which was holding a wickedly hooked knife. 

“Just hold still, pumpkin,” Jack crooned, “cuz this is gonna hurt.” 

Timothy frantically tapped at his watch, but no Digi-Jacks constructed to save him.  
Jack laughed. “I programmed those, hun. Do you really think they’d attack me?” He swung down the knife just as Timothy pulled out his pistol. He instinctively brought up the pistol to parry, and the knife hit it in a clash of metal. The barrel crumpled as if the Hyperion steel alloy was just aluminum. The shock of the impact forced Timothy to drop the gun, and he shook his wrist to work out the shock that spidered through his fingers.

“The hell kind of knife is that?” Timothy gasped, beginning to lose oxygen, a feeling all too familiar from Elpis.

“Oh, those Eridians sure know how to make weapons,” Jack cackled.

Timothy managed to choke out the words “you’re insane” before Jack brought the knife down a second time in a violet arc, drawing the blade down across his face. Red immediately flowed over Timothy’s vision as he screamed in pain. He desperately gasped for air as the knife fell a second time. Over the pain-dulled ringing in his ears, he could hear Jack laughing.

“Bet you’ll want a mask now, huh, cupcake? Eridian wounds don’t heal that well without scarring!” 

The wounds began to burn, and Timothy imagined they were glowing. The hand came away from his neck, and Timothy fell to his knees, bringing his hands to his face as though he could shove all the blood back where it came from. There was so much blood. It ran through his fingers like a river. Timothy, to his everlasting chagrin, began to cry.

SANCTUARY

“Wait, that’s how you got your scars?” Mordecai asked.

“Uh, yeah. What did you expect?” Tim replied. The hunter shrugged.

“I dunno, I figured that massive facial scarring would be the endgame. But you’re just leading with it.”

“It doesn’t make narrative sense,” Brick added. Tim glared at him.

“Well, I’m sorry my trauma doesn’t adhere to your storytelling standards.”

“Keep talking,” Lilith commanded. “You two, stop sidetracking him.”

“It was just a question,” Mordecai grumbled. 

HELIOS

“Don’t be a pussy,” Jack admonished. “Besides, you don’t want that saltwater in the wound, do ya?”

“You’re a monster, Jack,” Timothy choked out, tasting the blood that flowed into his open mouth. It did not taste good. No one thinks blood tastes good, except probably Handsome Jack. A dad-sneaker-clad foot struck him in the face, sending waves of pain shooting through his new wounds.

“It’s Handsome Jack, dumbass. Don’t forget it. It’s your name too now, you know.” Jack laughed maniacally. 

Timothy stood up with shaky legs, turned, and stumble-ran from the room, Jack’s laughter ringing horribly in his ears. 

Nisha was waiting there when the door slid open. Timothy had never seen her truly shocked, but she raised an eyebrow at the wounds on his face. 

“Damn,” she said, “I wasn’t expecting that.” 

Timothy fell against a desk, holding himself up by his left hand and clutching at his face with his right. It was so painful to have his hand against the open wounds, but he felt like all the blood would spill forth from his face if he didn’t hold it back. 

“Fuck!” he spat out, along with a considerable amount of tangy red blood. Nisha slung an arm around his shoulder.

“There’s no way you’re getting yourself to the medbay. C’mon.” She hauled him to his feet, and his world spun before his eyes. “You’re lucky Jack doesn’t want you dead yet. I wish he’d get someone else to clean up his messes. Heh. I’ll make sure to punish him for this.” Timothy squeezed his eyes shut, partly out of pain, partly to erase the mental image that had sprung, unbidden, to his mind. “Hyperion’ll fix you up.”


	2. Friends in Unexpected Places

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Timothy isn't alone as he thinks, as it turns out. But that doesn't make him any less trapped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To mitigate confusion: Timothy's ECHO ID is Handsome Jack, so that's who shows up as the sender of all of his messages. Timothy Lawrence technically no longer exists as far as the ECHONet is concerned.

Timothy was hospitalized for four days. It took him three days to recover enough to retain consciousness without drugs and be technically able to leave. The last day was for fitting him for a mask. It had been made clear he didn’t have much of a choice. Fortunately, the mask was going to be digistructed, not grafted to his face like it was to Jack’s; that would make any necessary touch-up surgery impossible. Still. 

 

When Timothy was finally released, he was instructed to return to his quarters and await orders. He did so without even thinking about it. Hyperion owned him, that much was clear now. 

 

Timothy flopped onto his bed with a sigh of relief. Hyperion hospitals did not prioritize comfort. When he picked up his ECHO, he saw he had one message. He frowned and mentally went over the list of people who had his number. None stood out as likely to contact him. He opened the message.

 

**Unknown Sender:** You have been wronged

 

He snorted humorlessly, suspecting some sort of joke on Nisha’s part. No one on his contacts list was likely to offer him sympathy. Another message pinged in.

 

**Unknown Sender:** I have been wronged, too

 

It was very hard to get an anonymous user ID on the ECHONet. Was this Jack, trying to get him to reveal the extent of his resentment? He typed a response.

 

**Handsome Jack:** Who is this?

 

It wasn’t long before he got his reply.

 

**Unknown Sender:** Hopefully, a friend. Someone you can trust. I think we both need someone to talk to. 

 

A blue glitch briefly flashed across his ECHO screen. 

 

**Unknown Sender:** Turn on your HUD

 

 

Timothy toggled the switch behind his ear and the ECHO visor fizzled to life. The diagnostics were all running normally. 

 

**Handsome Jack:** Now what?

 

The glitchy image of a woman’s face appeared in the center of his field of vision. Timothy took a sharp breath. She was smiling pleasantly, with black hair that drifted across her face. 

 

“Hello,” she said. At least, Timothy assumed it was her. Her mouth didn’t move with the sound of the voice, but he figured a mysterious female face and a mysterious female voice that appeared to him at the same time had to be correlated.

 

“Who are you?” he asked.

 

“I’m a friend.”

 

“You said that already.”

 

“We have a lot in common. I want to help you.” 

 

Timothy looked at her semi-pixelated face and scowled. He knew Handsome Jack had lots of AI projects up his sleeve. He just hadn’t thought his boss would send one to spy on him. He switched off his ECHO visor and put his ECHO tablet in his bedside drawer. He stripped off his clothes, pulled the covers over his sore body, and began to cry. 

 

SANCTUARY

 

_“And that was you?” Lilith asked. Angel nodded._

 

_“You cry a lot in this story,” Mordecai noted._

 

_“I like it,” Brick added._

 

HELIOS

 

The AI contacted him a month later. 

 

**Unknown Sender:** Jack didn’t send me

 

 

Timothy closed the message and opened his bank account. He sighed in disappointment. He now knew that, while Hyperion would provide for him as long as he worked for them, he was naive to assume he’d get his debts paid off before his 20-year term of servitude. 

 

His room was still decorated in annoyingly cheery yellow and red. He wasn’t a fan, but it would take 200 dollars to digi-decorate it in his favorite color, and he needed to save as much money as he could for the monthly payments into his loan account.

 

“I wish I had better wallpaper,” he muttered. His ECHO pinged.

 

**Unknown Sender:** What color? 

 

Timothy threw the ECHO onto the bed in a panic. There were no obvious monitoring devices in his room, but Hyperion architecture was nothing if not sneaky. He went through his room again, throwing over drawers and shoving aside coat hangers. He even unscrewed every lightbulb. Nothing. The ECHO pinged.

 

**Unknown Sender:** I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to alarm you. I promise you, nothing I hear or see makes its way back to Jack. 

 

Exactly what an AI programmed to make him trust it would say. An AI programmed to test his loyalty.

 

**Handsome Jack:** I have literally no reason to trust you

 

**Unknown Sender:** Nor I you

 

**Handsome Jack:** You contacted me, not the other way around

 

**Unknown Sender:** It’s been years since I’ve really had someone to talk to that wasn’t a vault hunter

 

**Handsome Jack:** I am a vault hunter

 

**Unknown Sender:** A vault hunter that talks back. The others didn’t.

 

SANCTUARY

 

_Brick looked excited. “Oh, we get a cameo in this story!”_

 

_Lilith sighed and responded,_

 

_“She’s talking about the time she manipulated us into a dangerous quest to open the Vault of the Destroyer, Brick.”_

 

_“Still.”_

 

HELIOS

 

Timothy was intrigued now. Apparently he wasn’t the first one of the Elpis squad this AI had been tasked to contact. But he was the first to respond. Which made him approximately 100 percent dumber than Nisha, Wilhelm, or Aurelia. He was confident he was smarter than Claptrap, and he already knew Athena was at least 300 percent smarter than him.

 

**Handsome Jack:** Did Athena try to stab you? I bet she did

 

He let a wave of self-pity wash over him for not getting out while he could.

 

**Unknown Sender:** She probably would if she ever saw me in person

 

**Handsome Jack:** How does one see an AI in person?

 

**Unknown Sender:** You think I’m an AI. Everyone seems to. Maybe because Jack makes me tell everyone that. I’m not. I’m a person, like you. I’m trapped.

 

Timothy recalled whispers in the hallways and stolen glimpses of Jack’s email communication. Something called the Angel Project that allowed Jack to monitor the Hyperion ECHOnet. The Angel Project was fairly public knowledge, but there was a secret underneath: that the Angel Project somehow involved a real person. Rumor had it, Jack had found out how to integrate technology into the human brain, allowing someone to control electronics with their mind. Rumor had it, he had done it years ago, before the idea of taking over Hyperion had ever been more than a pipe dream. Rumor had it, that was how he had had so much success on Pandora.

 

Rumor had it.

 

Timothy knew it was bullshit, but it was a powerful rumor.

 

**Handsome Jack:** So how are you talking to me?

 

**Unknown Sender:** It’s a long story. What’s your favorite color?

 

It was a harmless enough question for most people. Most people were not a body double of a man who told anyone who would listen that his favorite color was yellow. This was the first test. 

 

Timothy hesitated. 

 

If this AI was working for Handsome Jack, just this simple truth could result in serious consequences. But Timothy wanted to learn more about this enigmatic woman in blue pixels. He bit his lip. If he got punished for telling an AI his favorite color, he could always say he figured it didn’t matter, since she (it? did AIs have genders?) was working for Handsome Jack anyway. 

 

**Handsome Jack:** Blue, like the oceans of Janus-2. I miss it a lot

 

The walls rippled around him, and for a sickening moment Timothy felt like he did whenever he was on top of anything more than six feet up: like the world was about to flip upside down and throw him into the void. The next second, his walls were a cool, marine blue. The lights had changed to produce the effect of being underwater, and even the blankets had turned sandy brown like the long coastline where he had spent his childhood collecting seashells. He gasped softly and ran a hand over the wall. It was a premium decoration, and one that he absolutely could not afford. He 

checked his bank account again. His pitiful pile of savings remained untouched.

 

“Holy shit,” he murmured. He turned back to his ECHO.

 

**Unknown Sender:** I may not be an AI, but I’m wired into everything the Hyperion network touches. I hope you like my present. 

 

**Handsome Jack:** I do, actually. Thanks

 

**Unknown Sender:** Whatever you need, ask. I’m going to need your help someday. Hopefully soon. 

 

**Handsome Jack:** What’s that supposed to mean?

 

He didn’t get an answer.


	3. Update: Bandits Are Still Nuts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Timothy is sent on a mission to take out a bothersome bandit group, but it doesn't go as planned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, school's over and summer's here. I'll still be updating every weekend, so don't worry about that—but it won't be the same day every weekend. This fic actually has 9 chapters written and like 20 outlined, so don't worry, y'all ain't seen nothing yet. Constructive criticism is always welcome and appreciated!

After almost two years, Timothy was still not used to fighting bandits. The masked hordes still frightened him despite all his knowledge and experience. As he rolled behind a wrecked Hyperion moonshot container to reload his SMG, he reflected on the many alternate careers he could have chosen. Careers that didn’t involve fighting a bunch of psychotic moon cultists. Like writing, perhaps, or accounting. 

The smell of blood and chaos filled the air. It wasn’t his favorite smell. 

A distorted laugh and a female grunt of pain echoed over the battlefield as his handsome Digi-Jack dispatched a moonshot.

Timothy hadn’t envisioned himself forming emotional connections to his holograms, but he had still felt a tiny pang of loss when they were replaced with a stopwatch able to summon a single high-res doppelgänger that looked exactly like Handsome Jack. Exactly like Timothy.

Timothy emerged and had barely fired off a burst of bullets when a Moonshot shot him from behind. The bullets were absorbed by his shield, but Timothy cursed at himself for letting his guard down. 

He turned and punched the Moonshot in the face, but his knuckles protested in pain as they slammed into her pearly white ritualistic mask. It reminded him vaguely of the face of an Eridian, with its three-pronged single-eyed visor and material of indeterminate origin. She retaliated with a knife swing to the stomach, which Timothy countered with a bullet to the head. She fell to the ground, and Timothy turned away before he could see the body hit the ground with a thud, limbs twisted with the finality of his action. 

The fight was a blur of gunshots and smoke. The Moonshots were skilled, preferring to hide and evade while they stalled for time. Unbeknownst to them, the transport they were waiting for had already been destroyed, ironically, by moonshots sent down from Helios. They were sitting ducks. All Timothy had to do was shoot them out of the water. 

“Challenger!” 

Timothy looked up. Above him, on the roof of a building, stood Artemis. He smiled grimly. Just the girl he was looking for. 

She was the top priority target, according to Handsome Jack. She was the leader, the goddess, the cause of all the trouble to Hyperion transports. She was taller than she had looked on the bounty posters, with a cloud of black hair and intimidating arm muscles marked with glowing white lines. Her face was covered by a white ceremonial-looking mask, and in her glowing hands she held a bow with an arrow drawn and aimed at him. Timothy knew from watching the videos what she could do with that seemingly primitive weaponry. He aimed his gun and fired. In a second, she had jumped to the ground in front of him and struck him across the face with her bow. 

“Hey!” he barked. “That’s an expensive face there, jackass!” 

He fired again, but her shield ate the bullets. She nocked an arrow and fired. The arrow hit the ground between his feet, and before he could rattle off a snarky “you missed,” it released an arc of white energy that knocked him off his feet. 

Even as he fell hard on his butt and cursed, he felt an icy surge of confidence. Her weapons and markings were familiar. She was some sort of Eridian Ascendant, and Timothy had helped kill the most badass Ascendant of all. He could deal with this. Although he couldn’t help but wonder why he was fighting a moon-based cult that followed an Ascendant moon-based leader on Pandora and not on Elpis. 

When she fired her next arrow, he leaped onto the roof of a makeshift hut and launched himself at her, firing his spiker to activate his stabilizer. Before she could nock another arrow, he was only feet away. He shot for her hands, and while her shield was high capacity, the slight shock from each bullet became overwhelming and she dropped the bow. He kept firing, finally piercing through the shield and drawing blood, forcing her to jump down to the ground and take cover behind a repurposed moonshot container. 

“Keep the Moonshots away from me,” he instructed the other Hyperion soldiers over his ECHO. “I’ve got Artemis.” 

He jumped over the container and landed in her path as she tried to dive for her bow. With a fluid movement, he slammed her by the neck against the side of the container with his forearm and ripped off her mask. 

Timothy blinked. In the heat and smoke of the battle, she had seemed formidable; a tall, strong adversary, probably around thirty. But now, in this moment of calm, it was clear she couldn’t be more than sixteen. The white glow was fading from her eyes, and her glowing hand held back the white blood dripping from her right arm where Timothy’s spiker had hit its target. Her eyes were wide and filled with adrenaline and determination. The shock of black hair that billowed like a cloud around her face reminded Timothy of a girl he had known back home; she lived in his neighborhood and loved to climb buildings to gaze at the stars. For an insane moment, Timothy thought it was the same girl. 

“How old are you?” he asked incredulously.

“Old enough for your company to take everything from me,” she responded before spitting on his face. Timothy recoiled at both the spit and the hate in her voice. It was the hate that he recognized in every word he planned on saying to Jack before he inevitably chickened out and continued to serve his evil master. It was the hate that sparks either resistance or sullen hopelessness. 

Athena had chosen the former, and Timothy admired her for it. He had chosen the latter, and Timothy hated himself for it. The girl pinned by his forearm was a victim as much as he was. She watched his face closely, as though she knew the battle he was waging in his mind. 

Timothy withdrew his forearm from her neck.

“Get out of here,” he growled. “Don’t tell anyone about this.” She picked up her bow and scurried off into the smoke. 

Timothy heard a distinct hum. He looked up to see a surveyor propaganda bot watching him. As he watched it back, it flew away, no doubt to relay the interaction it had just witnessed back to Helios.

“Shit,” Timothy muttered, mentally starting his own doomsday clock, counting down to when he next saw Jack.


	4. Ooooooooo, Someone's In Troooouuuubleeeeee!!!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Timothy faces the repercussions for his act of mercy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, almost didn't get this chapter up on the weekend, but I managed to prevail over my procrastination.

Hyperion guns don’t necessarily need to be cleaned. Few guns need to be. A good Jakobs pistol requires a good once-over with a cloth every once in a while due to its wood components, but most guns come with auto-cleaning technology. 

Still, Timothy found a way to procrastinate his mission debrief by telling Jack he was cleaning his weapons. Which he was. He disassembled his spiker, his rifle, and his SMG with unnecessary care and scrubbed each one with cleaning fluid. He meticulously checked his shield for flaws. He scanned each grenade to make sure that none of them were at risk for randomly exploding. He refitted his holster with millimeter adjustments. He repeated all these processes three times. Finally, he bit the bullet and headed up to the office he had come to dread. 

When he walked through the sliding doors, the first thing he noticed was the fresh spatters of blood on the floor. The second was the white Eridian knife resting on the desk. It wasn’t the one Jack had used to scar him, but was obviously correlated with the blood. Timothy’s brain, which could have been productively planning his debrief, instead chose to come up with a series of increasingly ludicrous and paranoid explanations for the two things. Timothy did not like his brain very much sometimes.

SANCTUARY

“But did you ever find out the truth?” Mordecai asked. “About the knife?”

Tim sighed. 

“No. But thanks for that. Now I’ll just spend the next few weeks thinking about that thing I thought I’d moved on from.”

“Sorry,” Mordecai muttered.

“Don’t be,” Lilith told him. “He won’t live long enough to worry about it.”

HELIOS 

Jack was standing with his back turned to the door, gazing out at Elpis.

“Artemis is still out there,” he said with dangerous calm. 

Timothy flinched away from his voice.

“I’m sorry,” he said meekly. 

Jack turned around. His face was unreadable, as if he was wearing a mask. Which he was, but the mask was usually more expressive. So his face looked as if he was wearing a second, slightly larger mask over his regular mask. Whatever it was, it filled Timothy with unease. 

“Don’t worry about it, cupcake,” Jack told him. “It’s not your fault that asshole lieutenant—what was his name? Jenkins? Jerkins? Whatever. He let Artemis get away.” 

Timothy blinked. He hadn’t been expecting this. Then again, his interactions in Jack’s office rarely went as expected. The surveyor had recorded him letting Artemis go. Did Jack want him to admit it? Had the footage been lost somehow?

Jack misread his expression as one of concern and laughed. 

“Oh, I airlocked him, of course. Just try to keep better control over your troops next time, mmkay?” 

He grinned his shark grin and leaned over the desk to brush his fingers over Timothy’s chin. Timothy was grateful he couldn’t feel the touch through the mask. Jack abruptly flung himself into his executive chair. 

“So,” he demanded, “what did we learn today?”

“A-Artemis’s group, uh, the M-Moonshots,” Timothy stammered, “they, uh, use Eridian weapons. I wasn’t able to figure out where they got them, but some of them have been altered somehow, like the Eternals. They have, uh, superpowers? I guess? I don’t know.” 

Jack tutted in disappointment.

“I’ll be honest, I expected better from you. You don’t have anything useful? Really?” 

Timothy had rehearsed how to defend himself. It did no good. Conversations with Jack never went as rehearsed. He flinched away from Jack’s bullet-like words like a beaten dog. 

“And your lieutenant let their leader get away. You know what? I’m marking this down as a fail.” 

Timothy took a step back.

“I-I took out the entire Six-Shooter crew,” he said in his defense. “I’ve had a lot of wins, right?” 

Handsome Jack stood up, and even though he and Timothy were the same height by design, Jack seemed to tower over him. No one who could see the two of them side by side would fail to recognize which was the CEO and which was the serf. 

“I’m detecting a bit of ingratitude here, Jack,” Handsome Jack growled. “I’m the one who feeds and lodges you. I’m paying off your loans. I gave you that handsome face. ME! And you thank me with half-assed work. I expect more.” The semblance of goodwill that had been on Jack’s face not long before had been replaced with the truth, an unpleasant amalgamation of anger and self-pity. 

The most frightening demons see themselves as persecuted angels. 

“I-I’ll do better next time, I promise,” Timothy managed to force out. His throat, used to a hand against it in that office, was constricted of its own accord. He could barely get any words out. He clenched his fists until his fingernails drew blood from his palms. 

Jack simply stared at him. Without breaking eye contact, Jack picked up the knife from the desk. Timothy’s breath hitched.

“Wh-what’s that for?”

“Oh, nothing much,” Jack crooned. “I just had a little idea.” 

He switched the knife to the other hand, holding it by the blade, and offered it to Timothy. Timothy blinked and took the knife. He nearly dropped it, his hands were shaking so much. Jack pressed a button on his desk, and his bookshelf folded up into the ceiling to reveal the airlock. Within it were three moonshots sitting cross-legged, facing the glass. 

“I’m gonna give you a little choice, kiddo,” Jack said. “It seems you have a bit of trouble with killing, hmm? So I’ll tell you what: you have to kill these three. A bit of practice, see? But, since I’m nice, and since Artemis getting away wasn’t entirely your fault—lemme tell you, things would be a lot worse for you right now if it was—I’ll let you choose how. You can go in there and slit their throats,” he gestured to the Eridian knife, “or you can just press this button,” he gestured to the prominent red button on his desk, “and send them into space.” 

He folded his arms and smiled smugly. 

“Your choice, kitten.” 

Timothy dropped the knife. It clattered to the floor, and Jack fixed first it and then Timothy with a look of disappointment. 

“So you’re choosing the airlock. I have to admit, I wanted to see you stab them, but the airlock does have style, y’know?” 

Timothy shook his head.

“No.” 

Jack raised an eyebrow.

“Excuse me?” 

Timothy shook his head more vehemently, but was unable to say anything more. His voice always seemed to fail him when he needed it most. Jack threw his hands up in exasperation. 

“Oh, c’mon!” he complained. “You had no problem killing dozens of these chicks down there! You’ve got a kill count in the hundreds at least, kiddo. You’ve punched people to death with your bare hands, for fuck’s sake! So why can’t you just press a goddamn button?”

“It’s different,” Timothy managed to say. 

Jack rolled his eyes.

“This is like that goddamned DAHL soldier, isn’t it? The one you wouldn’t kill, because you’re a little bitch? Some shit about not being like me? Well, newsflash, kiddo, you sent another DAHL soldier who wasn’t fighting back to his death in a moonshot! And you are me now. You’re more me than you’ve ever been. Your choices are mine. So when your choices make me look bad, they are my problem.” 

Timothy took in a sharp breath, flinching not from Jack’s voice but from the knowledge that he was right. He had killed with the push of a button before. What made this different? 

Blue text scrolled across his vision.

Unknown Sender: I hate this as much as you do, but if you don’t push that button, things will get very bad for you. Please. I don’t want to see you hurt. 

Timothy remembered her words. She was wired into every piece of Helios tech.

Every robot. Every camera. Every communication.

He took a step towards the desk.

“That’s better,” Jack crooned. 

Timothy rested his hands on the edge of the desk and stared at the button. He looked at the three women in the airlock chamber. Their eyes were wide with fear, but their eyebrows were narrowed in courage. He remembered Artemis’s words to him; they were probably wronged by Hyperion. 

He looked into each of their eyes in turn. In an alternate universe, or a series of events were he was less of a coward, they could be his allies. Friends, even. 

He turned back to the button.

“What’s the holdup, cupcake?” Jack demanded. “I want those chicks launched into space yesterday.” 

Timothy squeezed his eyes shut, and before he could stop himself, slammed his palm against the button. As the airlock beeped, Jack grasped Timothy’s face and turned it towards the glass wall. 

“Open your eyes!” he screeched. 

Startled, Timothy obeyed without thinking, and watched as the three Moonshots grasped desperately at the walls of the airlock before the air was sucked out of their lungs and they were whisked, faces grey and frozen in an eternal scream, into the unforgiving vacuum of space. 

SANCTUARY

“I didn’t even know about that,” Lilith said. Her face was twisted in disgust. “You’re just like him.”

“That was my fault more than his,” Angel told her. “I forged the footage that put the blame on the lieutenant. Jack would have just tortured Tim if I hadn’t.” She drew herself up as tall as she could while bound to a post. “I don’t regret it.” 

Timothy looked over at her, then at Lilith.

“I do,” he said softly.

HELIOS

Timothy shut his eyes again, but it was too late. Their faces were frozen in his mind. Even the darkness of his eyelids brought little refuge. The faces of the bandits—no, not bandits, people—he had killed marched across his vision in a gruesome parade. It was so easy while fighting for his life on Elpis to see them as faceless numbers in a strategy vital to saving lives. But all the people he had killed then and since were truly just to further Handsome Jack’s goals. He had no justification. It wasn’t self-defense, it wasn’t coercion. It was cowardice, plain and simple. 

Jack let go of his face, and Timothy crumpled to the floor with his head in his hands. His breath began to come in shaky gasps, and he tried desperately to push his oncoming tears back into his eyes. 

So many suitors found those eyes beautiful. Timothy hated them. He had disliked how he looked before the surgery, but now he hated every line and feature of his face, because it was the perfect mirror of Handsome Jack, who was now groaning in exasperation.

“Get up,” he snapped, but Timothy was too distraught to obey, even after Jack delivered a sharp kick to his side that took his breath away for a few seconds and would definitely leave a bruise by the next morning. 

Timothy thought again how ridiculous Jack’s dad sneakers that had delivered the blow were, interjecting a delirious hiccup of laughter into his breakdown. This hazy amusement was sobered when Timothy remembered that he too wore the exact same shoes. 

“The Jaggedclaws have set up shop near one of our factories,” Jack growled. “You’re taking them out tomorrow. Now go clean yourself up.” 

He hauled Timothy up by his jacket collar and pushed him towards the door. 

“Take the secret route. Can’t have anyone seeing me like this.” He looked Timothy up and down. “You just have to embarrass me, don’t you?” He shook his head and sat back down at his desk, picking up a packet of paperwork. “Get out of my sight.”


	5. The Funtime Shack O' Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something's in the works at Hyperion. Some mysterious project in Thousand Cuts. Timothy is assigned to protect it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are...the end of Part I of this fic. 
> 
> I leave for camp tomorrow, but I fortunately get back next Saturday, so Chapter 6 should be up on Sunday. Thanks for reading so far, guys!

Timothy had plenty of experience with being replaced.

He was always the most expendable friend, the least valuable worker. He was always being shunted between jobs due to the hiring of more capable candidates. So it wasn’t a surprise when he learned that Jack had been creating more body doubles. 

“Don’t worry, pumpkin,” Jack had explained to him with his feet up on his desk, tossing popcorn into his open mouth, “they may all have my handsome face, but not even my best engineers can hold a candle to your combat skills.” He chuckled. “You’re gonna be killing a lot more bandits from now on.”

That was fine with Timothy. After the Moonshots, he had put up a wall between himself and bandits. He reminded himself on a daily basis that they weren’t people, not really, that they had chosen to defile Pandora rather than lead productive lives. He nodded grimly. He could kill them without a single stain on his conscience. 

He wasn’t even sure if he had a conscience anymore.

So, with barely any notice, Timothy found himself on a transport down to Thousand Cuts on Pandora, where he was to defend a construction site from the new bandit gang that had set up shop in a nearby abandoned factory town. 

SANCTUARY

“That’s my slabs!” Brick exclaimed. 

“Ooooo, your super-badass team of bandits? And this guy musta killed a lot of ‘em, huh?” said the tiny blonde child that had traipsed out of Scooter’s garage with a face covered in soot and a stuffed rabbit in each hand. She made Timothy rather uneasy. “Dozzat make you maaaaddd?”

“This was before they were your Slabs,” Angel explained. “They were just a group of bandits down on their luck.”

TRANSPORT

Timothy had no idea what Hyperion was constructing, but he had heard words like “bunker” and “intelligence core” bandied about in closed-door meetings and employee slips of the tongue. He had asked the AI he now knew was named Angel about it, but she had nothing to contribute except vague and anxious reassurances. She was becoming quite the friend, although he really didn’t have anyone to compare her to.

The transport was too small. It rattled back and forth like winds were trying to tear it apart even before they entered the atmosphere, and all the windows were set to show off the view. When Timothy tried to set them to maximum opacity so he didn’t have to look down at the planet far below them, the captain informed him that this transport had been preset to keep all the windows at full transparency at all times. Handsome Jack was familiar with Timothy’s crippling fear of heights. Timothy couldn’t help but feel that these things were correlated. 

If Handsome Jack’s intent was to clamp Timothy’s hands to the arms of his seat and leave him shivering and sweating with his eyes clamped shut, he had succeeded. 

The trip was only about twice as long as that fateful journey in a gerrymandered moonshot cannon down to Elpis’ surface, but as Timothy clenched his fists and tried not to throw up, it seemed ten times longer. The captain cast him a few frightened glances. Timothy was used to it. It had been a long time since anyone except Angel had looked at him with something other than awe or fear—usually a combination of both. 

Angel didn’t count, really. Her “looking at him” was just a sort of high-res prerecorded pixel animation.

His house in Thousand Cuts was far better than his quarters on Helios. This said something about how shitty his room on Helios was, as the house was approximately one step above shack status. Still, it came with a chest full of top-notch fresh-off-the-line Hyperion weapons. 

Timothy whistled appreciatively at the gleaming red and black repeater that nestled on a bed of maroon velvet. He picked it up and tested its weight. He removed his basic white and yellow spiker from its hip holster and placed it on the chipboard nightstand, replacing it with the new weapon. Only then did he inspect the rest of the house. It had several rooms, which was an improvement. 

The bedroom came with a closet full of identical outfits. 

SANCTUARY

“Wait,” Mordecai interrupted, “identical outfits?”

“Yeah, he always wore the same clothes,” Timothy told him. Lilith whistled.

“Damn, I had no idea. So he just never did laundry?” she asked, her face wrinkled in disgust.

“No,” Timothy corrected, “he just had a bunch of copies of the same outfit like, all the time. So I also did.”

“It was super weird,” Angel added. 

“Yeah,” Timothy continued, “I don’t miss it.”

“You’ve been wearing the same jacket for years,” Mordecai pointed out.

“Anyway,” Timothy said, “on with the story.”

THOUSAND CUTS 

When Timothy entered the small dining room, he saw an ECHOChip resting on the table. A cursory scan revealed it to be a document set down from Helios station. He opened it on his ECHOTab and groaned at the page count. He sat down, preparing for a long afternoon of reading.

“I wish this thing had Bluff’s Notes,” he grumbled. 

A vague holographic human form flickered into view across the table, and his heart skipped a beat with memories of paranormal horror films he had watched at far too young an age. The figure waved at him in a friendly manner. Only one person was friendly to him, although she didn’t usually look like that. 

“Jesus, Angel,” Timothy complained, “you scared me. I thought you were a ghost.”

“I’ve been experimenting with ECHO projection,” she explained proudly. “How much detail can you see? This is much harder than what I was doing before.”

“Just a vague outline,” Timothy told her. “You’re flickering in and out a little.” 

The figure—Angel, Timothy reminded himself—folded her arms in disappointment. 

“It’s an improvement, though,” he hurriedly continued. “Better than talking to a disembodied face, anyway.” 

He held up the ECHOChip. “Can you help me with this?”

Angel cocked her head and disappeared. 

“Angel?”

“I’m still here,” her voice echoed in his ears. “I just can’t project myself like that while I’m doing other things. I should be done with this in five minutes or so.”

She needed focus to talk to him. She didn’t talk about her tasks like she was sitting at a keyboard, typing furiously into a field of green binary code or whatever hackers did. She talked about accessing systems like it was fighting, or running, or breathing. Like they were almost a part of her. Timothy didn’t know what this meant, and she wasn’t about to tell him. 

The blinking blue light in the corner of his vision indicating an active connection ceased its blinking and disappeared. 

Timothy pushed back his chair and stood up, deciding to explore the small kitchen. Despite its size, it was outfitted with top Hyperion kitchenware, designed to efficiently produce nutritionally balanced meals, according to the cheery cover of the product manual resting on the wood-topped counter.

When Timothy opened the fridge, he found it full of MREs and basic ingredients to make quick meals. The door was outfitted with a supply scanner. 

Timothy glanced out the window and noticed for the first time a small supply beacon out on the lawn. 

Presumably, anything he needed would be sent by moonshot. He hoped they would use the smaller transport containers, but Handsome Jack had a vindictive sense of humor, and Timothy was not entirely sure that his comfort and/or life outweighed the amusement the maniacal man would get from seeing Timothy’s humble little shack taken out by a moonshot.

SANCTUARY

“He’d totally do that,” Lilith said. “That man was evil. You knew that. Why didn’t you just book it? Did you just not care?”

“What choice did I have?” Tim demanded. “I was alone, afraid, and completely under his control. Angel was my only ally, and at that point I still suspected she was loyal to Handsome Jack. I never had much courage to begin with, and him slashing up my face when I tried to resign didn’t help.”

“But you escaped eventually, right?” Brick asked. Tim fixed him with an impatient glare.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

THOUSAND CUTS

Timothy grabbed some orange juice out of the fridge, unscrewed the cap, and took a swig directly from the carton. This small act of rebelliousness gave him a thrill of satisfaction. Not many disobediences were left to him.

“That seems unsanitary.” 

Timothy turned around to see Angel’s holographic form standing in the middle of the kitchen. Her pose was unsettling, like an artist’s mannequin. 

“Who else is gonna drink it?” he said, like a true punk, taking another sip out of the carton and inadvertently dribbling a little juice down his digistructed chin. “What did that ECHOChip say?”

“It’s orders from Jack. You’re basically here to keep an eye on the construction project and kill any bandits that get close. Also he says if you want to kill any bandits that don’t get close that’s fine. Or, you could launch a one-man assault on their camp and slaughter every last one of them. He says that’s fine too.”

“Great,” he grumbled, “I’m a glorified security guard.” 

“Better than being a glorified propaganda actor,” she reminded him.

“Not as cool as being a vault hunter,” he countered. 

That was saying something, as he hadn’t particularly enjoyed being a vault hunter. Her projection glitched for a second, and suddenly she was sitting on the counter.

“I’ve always thought it would be cool to be a vault hunter,” she said wistfully. 

It was disconcerting to see her in front of him but hear her voice as though she was speaking to him over a comm. Timothy hoisted himself up on the counter beside her.

“What do you think is cool about it?” he asked her.

“I’d get to see Pandora,” she told him. “Or any planet, for that matter. I want to learn more about the Eridians. I want to roam the land with no one to answer to but myself. I want to work for myself and the bounty boards, not Hyperion.”

“It’s not all fun and games,” Timothy told her. “You have to sleep on the ground a lot and eat roasted torks. You have to fight everything from bandits to wildlife to robots. Laundry opportunities are limited. And the jobs you get aren’t always rewarding or nice. Even if you do find a vault, your only rewards might be a few rare shotguns and a psychopath boss.” 

She shrugged.

“That’s the price of freedom. Any price is worth paying for that.” 

Timothy’s heart surged in her direction. As much as he had hated Elpis, he’d gladly go back to hunting vaults if it meant escaping Handsome Jack. Hearing her talk about Pandora with such a hopeful tone in her voice made him want to skip town and roam the open country in a runner, looking into whatever mysteries came his way. 

But he couldn’t. 

He’d make it as far as the Highlands, if that, before Handsome Jack would come down and put him through a hell he wouldn’t survive. Or he’d just send a moonshot to turn Timothy into red mist. 

A sudden, paralyzing thought raced across his brain.

“Wait,” he told her, “we’re being monitored.” 

His chest seized up and his breath came in rapid bursts. He was naive to think he could have any conversation that Jack didn’t hear. Nothing in his life was outside of that man’s influence; not his body, not his job, not his voice, not his life. The whole house was a giant ear. It was a house, but it was also a prison; while he could physically leave, everything in the place would keep him a tethered slave as long as Jack needed him. Things would be worse once Jack no longer needed him. He stared at the floor, but he didn’t see it. His vision blurred and his muscles tensed. 

“Hey,” Angel told him, “Tim, hey, it’s okay. Your entire house is bugged, yes. But I’m networked into every piece of Hyperion tech. Every bit of audio goes through me first. Perks of being Jack’s hacker. We can talk in peace. He won’t hear anything you don’t want him to.” 

Timothy forced himself to look away from the linoleum tiles and up at her. Her body was just a faint suggestion of blue pixels now; she had put all her concentration into putting a serene, comforting smile on her face. 

Timothy put his head in his hands. 

“I need some pills,” he muttered. Tears lurked behind his eyes. Not now, tears, he told them. Not ever. No crying. 

“I’ll see if I can put some Xanax in your next shipment,” Angel said. 

Timothy smiled faintly in thanks. He wasn’t sure if she could see it, but it was all he could offer. In all truth, having her next to him did as much good as any pill. She was his guardian angel. He couldn’t imagine life under Jack without her as his invisible ally. He took a deep breath and steeled himself.

“We’re gong to get out of here,” he told Angel, trying to convince himself as much as her. “We’re going to roam Pandora freely. We’re going to be free from Handsome Jack.”

He brushed his hand across his digistructed mask and dreamed of the day he would rip it free from his face. 

“We’ll be free under the sun someday.”

“All we have to do,” Angel confirmed, “is wait for the right moment.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angel hatches a plan. We don't get to see what that plan is. Suspense, motherfuckers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp. This is the start of part 2. I've got some shit in the works. This chapter almost didn't get posted this week, after I restructured literally the entire plot. Anyway. Enjoy. :)

Angel had everything she could possibly want.

She had a huge, soft bed and a closet full of clothes. She had a kitchen that could deliver to her the finest of ingredients and summon a robot to make them into gourmet meals. She had a whole room full of exotic gifts from every corner of the six galaxies: trinkets that many would kill to possess, so they came with bloodstained histories. 

But she didn’t have her freedom. 

That made her whole Helios suite worth as much to her as a handful of dirt. Actually, less. If she could choose between all her father’s riches or walking the soil of bandit-ridden, lawless Pandora, she’d choose the psychos any day. 

So when her father decided to move her to Pandora, she saw an opportunity. For one transport ride, she would be outside of a maximum-security Hyperion facility. 

She had access to every computer system. 

More importantly, she had a vault hunter ally.

She had all the information. She had too much time on her hands, so she used it to spin her plan like a spider at the center of her great web. 

The Thousand Cuts Bandits were all too eager to get their hands on Hyperion money. Timothy Lawrence longed for freedom almost as much as she did. And they were both on the ECHONet. 

So she put her plan into place through secret, untraceable communications and a great deal of espionage. With her words and her skills combined, it was child’s play to turn the allies she needed to her side. Years of servitude had turned her into a master manipulator, and while she hated talking people into doing her bidding, such scruples were trivial next to the intoxicating possibility of freedom. 

And she didn’t have much time. 

After the opening of the Vault, Jack had contented himself with putting a large store of Eridium in a room in her quarters, allowing her to take what she needed to augment her powers. But now he was experimenting. He had installed small pods of Eridium in the collar around her neck that connected to injectors. She could feel the Eridium coursing through her veins like fire, and although it made her more powerful, she hated it. She didn’t have much time before she was completely dependent on Eridium for survival and it replaced the blood in her body. 

Angel leaned back in her chair and pressed a few keys. A virtual starscape ballooned into the air before her. She could still name every galaxy and major star system, even though it had been five years since she had looked at a star map. She had put the memory of the night sky out of her mind since she realized she’d never get another view of it besides the pitiful sliver from the thin porthole window in her bedroom. But now that freedom was within reach, she allowed herself a reminder of what she was fighting tooth and nail to regain.


	7. Hijacking Planes And Other Extreme Sports

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angel puts her plan into action. Timothy follows along. Bandits shoot things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things are heating up...
> 
> This is honestly so fun to write. I've got it written through chapter 12 and planned through chapter 25, so it's gonna be a lot of weeks before we're through. Keep reading!

Strictly speaking, Timothy wasn’t supposed to be loitering around the west end of the Bunker. Strictly speaking, Timothy also wasn’t supposed to be in secret communication with a Hyperion hacker and/or AI to plot both of their escapes. Strictly speaking, however, Timothy was sick of Hyperion. 

Which is how, instead of doing Handsome Jack’s paperwork for the latest raid on the nearby bandit camp, he found himself tapping his foot anxiously and watching the growing dot in the sky that his ECHO told him was Angel’s transport. 

He breathed in.

He breathed out.

12:54 PM Earth time.

The transport grew closer.

1:00 PM. 

The transport was beginning to come in for a landing.

That’s when the bandits attacked.

Timothy heard them first: the telltale whir of buzzards swooping through the burnished sky and towards the tall structure reeking of Hyperion money. They began to fire their guns at the building. Timothy watched as a rippling blue shield, glimmering like the surface of a lake, threw itself up around the whole structure. It stopped both the buzzards and the transport from coming any closer. 

Timothy knew what was supposed to happen next. The transport would return to Helios, and JET Loaders would come in to destroy the buzzards.

That was not what happened.

The transport looked like someone who was deciding whether or not to enter a room to have a difficult conversation. It vacillated between the sky and the ground before, with a shudder like the decision was made for it, it slowly began its descent to a small flat piece of ground. The same piece of ground Timothy was currently standing at the edge of. 

“Tim,” her voice echoed faintly in his ears. “I can’t…”

The transport stopped descending. It went up a little, then down a little. It was only fifteen feet off the ground, but down was rapidly losing the battle.

“Shit,” Timothy muttered, pulling the grapple-gun from his belt that he had promised himself he wouldn’t use. He put on the digi-harness, ran at the transport, and fired without giving himself time to think about it.

He did a lot of things without giving himself time to think about them. It occurred to him that he would probably regret that.

Timothy had done a lot of terrifying things, but they all paled in that moment as he breathlessly hurtled up towards the transport on a retracting metal line. The air itself seemed to blur around him and his fearful heart caught in his throat. He caught onto the landing gear and held on for dear life while unleashing a string of muttered curses that Handsome Jack would have been proud of. The transport, along with Tim’s stomach, lurched in midair. He was clinging to the underside of the plane, feeling the wind rush through his hair, trembling with cold and fear. 

“Tim,” Angel told him sleepily, “please.”

He held the memory of her voice and used it to still his trembling hands. He reminded himself to breathe. 

“I can do this,” he told himself through gritted teeth. “I’ve made it this far.”

He withdrew the screwdriver from his belt and set to work. 

With a few clever twists and connected wires, the landing gear panel opened, and Timothy shimmied through it and into the cargo hold. The panel closed behind him, almost crushing his foot. 

Timothy sat there for a breathless minute while he pondered the possibility of a life without a foot before examining his surroundings. There was nothing in the cargo hold except a sort of box. On closer examination, Timothy saw it was a modified stasis chamber, except with a tube running into it filled with bluish-purple liquid. With some trepidation, he walked over to it and softly pushed the open button. The chamber opened with a quiet hiss.

Angel had told Timothy that she was a person, not an AI, countless times, but he had never really believed it. 

Not until then. Not until he saw her pale, sunken face standing out against the blue velvet. He knew it was her the moment he saw her; there was still a hint of a compassionate smile in her tired face. Her bright blue eyes were half-closed and fighting against unconsciousness. Around her neck, just above the collar of her black bodysuit, was a metal collar connected to the tube he had noticed earlier. 

Timothy didn’t like the tube. It glowed with the same pulsing light as the tentacles that had pumped slag into the Eye of Helios, complete with the same hexagonal netting. It made her seem alien, other. He decided it was probably not good for a human girl to be pumped full of the same stuff that had powered a planet-smashing laser.

He grabbed the tube and yanked it out of the collar.

She gasped, and her eyes flew open. 

“Oh my god,” Timothy hissed, panicked, “was that the wrong thing? Did I hurt you? I didn’t mean to.” 

Her eyes fluttered closed again. Timothy grasped her under her arms and hauled her out of the pod. It was like lifting a moderately sized gun. He was strong from years of vault hunting, and she was light from years of…whatever she’d been going through. Probably nothing good. Timothy could see how bony her arms were even through the fabric of the bodysuit she was wearing. 

“Okay,” he muttered, lifting her fireman-style over his shoulder, “where to go from here?”

He had to get them out of the transport before it got back to Helios. To do that, he had to land the transport. To do that, he had to take over the transport. 

His eyes landed on the ladder leading up to the main passenger bay. He had no idea how many enemies would await him there, and his traditional source of Hyperion-related information was currently passed out over his shoulder. The gnawing fear of what Handsome Jack would do to him and the anxiety over leaving Hyperion reminded him of their presence. Timothy ignored them. Ordinarily, they would overwhelm him, but he leaned on his traditional loophole of focusing on people who needed him.

He never could have completed the Elpis missions alone. He missed Athena and Wilhelm. 

SANCTUARY

“So your Elpis BFFs were the Lance assassin and the ruthless cyborg. Figures,” Lilith said.

“They were the only ones who respected me as my own person,” Tim replied. “And no one on that mission was truly morally unambiguous.”

“Fancy words won’t get you out of any of this,” Liliith snarled.

“I’m an English major. Fancy words got me into this mess.”

THOUSAND CUTS

Timothy had just reached the ladder when the bullets hit the engine and the plane began to crash.

The lurching battle before between Angel and the plane’s pilot had been controlled, quiet, and civil. This was a crashing of metal and a bursting of heat, a heart-rending scrape as one of the engines coughed and struggled against bullets and shrapnel. Timothy felt the sickening swoop in his stomach as the transport began to list to one side. He grabbed onto the ladder with one hand and Angel with the other. She weakly patted his back to signal that she was at least partially awake.

“Go to sleep,” he told her. “You need rest.”

Yells and barked orders began to come from the cockpit above. Timothy took advantage of the noise to scale the ladder—not an easy or quiet task with a girl over one shoulder and the plane going down. 

When he finally popped the hatch open and hauled himself and Angel into the main passenger bay, he was met with a whole dozen well-armed and panicked Hyperion soldiers who looked incredibly surprised to see their boss and their cargo ascend from the cargo bay they may not have even known existed. Timothy remembered the face he was wearing and allowed himself to willingly slip into it.

“So you jackasses got the plane shot, huh?” he snapped. Angel flinched imperceptibly. The soldiers stared back at him dumbly. He waved his hand.

“Put this hunk of junk down wherever you can!” he ordered loudly in the direction of the pilot. 

“R-roger, sir,” a scared voice replied over his ECHO. No one in the room questioned his presence. That wouldn’t last. 

Another burst of gunfire thudded against the plane. Timothy heard the sharp sound of shattered glass and the even sharper sound of the pilot’s scream. The plane began to plummet. He muscled his way into the cockpit, where the dead pilot was listing against her bloody seatbelt. 

Timothy placed Angel into the empty copilot chair and unbuckled the pilot’s corpse. It fell to the floor with an anticlimactic thump. He took the controls. The seatbelts automatically activated, securing him to his seat.

He’d been taught how to fly before, on Handsome Jack’s sadistic orders. That was in a simulation, or a transport only feet off the ground, with autopilot ready to kick in at any moment. Now, with the ground spinning below him and one engine at 40% functionality, he was paralyzed. 

“Hey,” Angel murmured. He looked over at her. She was smiling lazily and looking at him with drug-dulled eyes. 

“It’s just like riding a bike, Tim,” she told him. “Just…” her head slumped back onto the headrest and she began snoring softly.

Timothy grabbed the joysticks, flipped some switches, and set his jaw in a determined manner.

“All right,” he told himself, “time to land this sucker.”


	8. The Moderately Okay Escape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phase 2 of their escape plan goes into effect.

The wreckage was silent. 

Timothy opened his eyes to a still sky and silent air. Angel was still slumped over in the copilot’s chair, eyes closed in sleep. He tugged his leg out from under the console, which he immediately realized had probably been a mistake. His ankle burned and throbbed with the familiar pain of a bad sprain. He searched his pockets and found a small Anshin in his jacket. He drove the syringe into his leg and felt the pain slowly lessen. He hauled himself out through the windshield of the buzzard, then put his jacket over the broken-glassed edge of the windshield to drag Angel’s limp form out after him. He threw Angel over his shoulder and limped away from the wreckage. His ankle still screamed at him with every step. The buzzard remained silent aside from the occasional metallic creak. He hadn’t done a very good job at landing it.

Timothy clawed the digistruct anchor clamps off his face with the butt of his pistol and they fell to the ground, leaving his face uncovered. He took a deep, centering breath, feeling the air finally flow freely over his face for the first time in forever.

SANCTUARY

“Why didn’t you check for survivors?” Lilith demanded.

“You’ve killed far more Hyperion soldiers than I have,” Tim responded. “Why do you care all of a sudden?”

“I ask the questions,” she told him. “You answer them.” 

Tim shrugged as much as he could while tied to a post.

“They weren’t important.”

THOUSAND CUTS

It took Timothy a few minutes to get his bearings. They had landed smack in the middle of the bandit camp, and while most of the bandits were out attacking the Control Core, as he approached the outskirts a few masked figures slowly began to creep out of their shacks. Timothy tried to hide when he could, but it was hard with Handsome Jack’s clothes, a sprained ankle, and a teenaged girl over one shoulder.

“Got some handsome meat here, boys!” a bandit shouted loudly, bursting out of the door to his lean-to, the window of which Timothy had just imprudently passed by.

“Shit,” Timothy muttered. He drew his new pistol with his free hand and shot the bandit three times in the chest. But by then, the damage was done. The few bandits left to guard the camp began emerging from their tents and standing up from their barroom card games. 

He had three options: talk, fight, or run. Per usual, he chose option C. 

They were almost at the gate. He set off on his hobbling shamble-run, hearing the whoops and hoots of bandits behind him. 

His shield’s capacity kept going down with each telltale shot of a bullet. He activated the Digi-Jack to draw fire, even as he winced at the cackle that sprang from its holographic lips. Timothy switched to his incendiary spiker and started shooting, aiming more to catch things on fire than actually hit his masked targets. He accomplished his aim. Shit was soon on fire.

They passed under the toothed gate. The fast travel station was in reach. Timothy and Angel were going to make it.

“Not so fast, kiddo.”

They were so close. There was the fast travel station. And there, between them and their freedom, was their jailer, Handsome Jack. 

Timothy froze in his tracks. 

“You know what really pisses me off?” Jack continued. “Listen, it’s one thing to want to resign. I mean, hey, I get it. I was pissed at Tassiter quite a few times. Stuck with it though, ‘cause I’m not a little bitch, but that’s beside the point. But kidnapping an innocent girl? You have a problem with me, you bring it up with me. ME! Not my family.” His voice was silky and quiet. He put on that voice when he knew he was going to win. “You got that, kitten?”

Timothy blinked. Family?

“Out of the way, Jack,” Timothy demanded, trying and somewhat failing to sound more confident than he actually felt. 

“Oh, I’ll get out of the way, all right,” Jack crooned. “After I’m done killing you, you monstrous child snatcher.”

“Stop,” Angel said weakly. “You’re a liar.” She tapped Timothy’s back. “I can stand, Tim.” 

Timothy set her feet down on the ground. She leaned into him for support, but remained standing on her own. She pointed an accusing finger at Handsome Jack. 

“Let me go,” she demanded. “I’m tired of being a prisoner.”

“Angel,” Jack said pleadingly, a tone Timothy had never heard him use, “you know that was necessary! You couldn’t contr—“

“Stop lying!” Angel screamed in his face. “You’re always twisting events, twisting words. You never tell anything the way it actually went. I’m done, dad. I’m done being your pet Siren.”

She spat at him, landing the spit neatly on his masked cheekbone.

SANCTUARY

“Was this the first time you ever stood up to him?” Lilith asked. 

Angel nodded, looking ashamed. Tim wanted to tell her that she had no reason to be, that she was scared and under a madman’s control, but even if he could tell her that in front of all their enemies, he wasn’t confident in his ability to find the words to do so.

“Why?” Lilith snarled more than asked. 

“You don’t understand,” Angel told her. “I saw what he did to people who stepped out of line. And I was cut off from the outside world when I was seven. I didn’t know that wasn’t how a family was supposed to be until much later.”

“C’mon, Lil,” Mordecai drawled, “you gotta admit the girl’s got balls for sayin’ it to his face like that.”

“Stop complimenting the prisoner,” Lilith ordered.

THOUSAND CUTS

Timothy blinked again. Angel had just dropped two very significant bombs about her identity, one far more shocking than the other. Timothy was vaguely aware that he should probably be doing something about the situation, but he wasn’t good with conflict. 

Jack, meanwhile, looked like normal people do when they’ve just been punched. Which is to say, shocked, hurt, and confused, rather than Jack’s typical post-punch emotion of uncomfortable arousal and maniacal amusement. His gaze landed on Timothy and picked up on the latter’s confusion.

“She didn’t tell you any of this, did she?” he asked rhetorically. “She’s using you, you know. She’s not well. I tried to protect her. Everything I’ve done was to protect her. Surely you can understand that. You’d do anything to protect your family.”

That was a low blow, and Handsome Jack knew it. Angel cast Timothy a pleading glance. 

“He’s lying. Everything he says is a lie,” she told him.

Timothy gave Angel’s hand a comforting squeeze.

“I’m not you, Jack,” he said quietly. “And we’re leaving.”

Handsome Jack’s pleading gaze turned ugly. Before Timothy could react, he lunged for Angel and grabbed her left arm. A second later, he fell to the ground with a cry of pain, clutching his hand, which was twitching uncontrollably. 

“Don’t touch me,” Angel demanded coldly. She pulled on Timothy’s hand, and they stumbled the final thirty feet to the fast travel station as Handsome Jack cursed Timothy, his mother, his father, his family dog, and anyone he’d ever met. 

As they approached the station, Jack changed tactics.

“Please,” he called, “please, I’ll do anything. I’ll give you Hyperion. I’ll let you quit. I’ll give you your old life and ten million dollars. Just please…please don’t take my baby girl.” 

Several things happened at once.

Angel laid her palm against the fast travel station, clasping Timothy’s forearm with her free hand. Timothy presented his middle finger to Jack. Jack drew a Jakobs revolver.

Timothy felt two sharp aches in his stomach, and suddenly he was fast-traveling. 

SANCTUARY

“Wait a minute,” Lilith interjected. “Tell us the real story.”

“That is the real story,” Tim told her. She shook her head.

“There is no way two of Handsome Jack’s most valued assets got away just like that. You killed a bunch of innocent people, didn’t you? Or you cut some sort of deal? Got help from a rival corporation?”

Tim sighed.

“It was that easy.”

“What? There’s no way,” Mordecai echoed.

“Just let me finish the damn story.”


	9. The Most Depressing Clothes Shopping Trip Ever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They're not home free yet, but they're getting closer with every step.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This month, I'm doing an absolutely harrowing (but incredibly fun and rewarding) internship that leaves me little time and energy to write. I've got the next three chapters written, but after that I might have some trouble doing weekly updates.

“Tim.”

Timothy groaned and coughed wetly. He didn’t feel so good. His arms tingled with cold and his stomach felt hot and tight.

“Tim. The Anshins won’t do all the work for you.”

Timothy opened his eyes. Angel was leaning over his prone form, looking concerned. The purple lights on her collar beeped dully. His vision blurred and shifted as he moved his head from side to side, attempting to get a sense of his surroundings.

“Where are we?” he muttered. 

“We’re in the town of Triggerlock. I’ve disabled the fast travel and given you some Anshins. You nearly died, Tim.” Somehow, she managed to sound calmer delivering this news than Timothy did trying to order a coffee.

Timothy pushed himself into a sitting position, a movement that sent waves of pain emanating from his stomach, and examined his surroundings. They were in the lobby of some sort of office complex. He could see a small reception desk, and, beyond it, rows of empty cubicles. To their right was a fast travel station and a med vendor.

“Tim,” Angel continued, “I need you to do something for me.” She gestured to her collar. “There’s a fingerprint sensor on the back of this. I need you to get it off.”

Timothy nodded, in no state to question orders. Angel turned around, and Timothy made out a purple oval on the back of the collar. He pressed the tip of his pointer finger to it. The collar beeped dully and the small indicator lights went out. Angel took in a sharp breath. Before Timothy could ask if she was okay, she grabbed the collar and violently ripped it away from her skin, leaving tiny beads of blood behind. She then unceremoniously tossed the metal into a corner, where one of the purple vials broke, spilling its contents onto the linoleum floor. She slowly sat down and turned back to Timothy with a pained smile.

“Much better,” she told him in a husky voice. The collar had left behind a ring of paler, purple-tinged skin.

“Are you okay?” Timothy asked. 

Angel laughed humorlessly. 

“I’m not the one we should be worried about.” 

She gestured to Timothy’s stomach. Timothy looked down and saw, to his surprise, a large bloodstain there. With trepidation, he pulled the shirt away from his skin, revealing the healing tissue indicative of an Anshin. 

“Don’t worry about me, Tim,” she told him. “I’m fine. I promise.”

With a grunt, Timothy pushed himself to his feet. 

“We need to get moving,” he said. 

Angel gestured to his flamboyant layers and her own sci-fi-style bodysuit. 

“We’re not exactly inconspicuous,” she reminded him. “Hyperion personnel will have orders to kill you and capture me on sight.” 

Timothy looked past her into the office space, where he caught a glimpse of a jacket hung over the back of a chair.

“Let’s loot this place,” he suggested. “See what you can find.”

As it turned out, there was a lot more clothing than one would expect inside that small office building. By the end of their “shopping spree,” Timothy sported a bandit jacket and a pair of goggles, while Angel had found a high-collared Clima-Coat, a Pangolin t-shirt, and a pair of cute leggings that went along great with a pair of boots she had found in a closet somewhere. Timothy approached her as she admired herself in a mirror with fascination rather than vanity.

“I need a hat,” she told Timothy. “You do too, probably.” 

She found a wide-brimmed sunhat that covered the odd metal plates set into the shaved side of her head and undid her ponytail, while Timothy contented himself with a vintage Atlas trucker hat. It was well taken care of, probably a prized possession. This made him wonder why it was left behind in an underground office building. This made him want to leave said underground office building immediately.

SANCTUARY

“So we can add petty theft to the list now,” Lilith said.

Angel gave her a Look, with a capital L.

“Considering you were a bounty hunter and committed murder for money,” she retorted, “I don’t think you can take the moral high ground on petty theft, of all things.”

Lilith drew herself up, affronted.

“You know,” Mordecai mused, “she does have a point.”

TRIGGERLOCK

“Looks like my outfit’s complete,” Angel said. 

“Not yet,” Timothy told her. 

She looked back at him with a little frown. He handed her a thigh holster he’d found in a file cabinet, along with a Jakobs revolver from his Backpack. Angel took the items with a look of distrust.

“I don’t want to shoot anyone,” she told him. 

“This is Pandora,” he replied. “You’re probably going to have to.”

Angel sighed and strapped on the holster, then thrust the gun into it.

“Time to go,” Angel said, striding decisively towards the door. Timothy grabbed her arm. She yanked it away, startled. He put his hands up in a gesture of apology.

“Sorry, sorry. It’s just, well, don’t you need to rest or something? You were sedated and unable to stand just like ten minutes ago.”

“Just like two hours ago,” she told him. “Those gunshots and the healing stress from the syringes took you out for a while. We have to keep moving before Handsome Jack tracks us here.”

“Can’t he track us through the fast travel station?” he asked anxiously. “I mean, he’s definitely monitoring my pass, so…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Angel replied. “I completely scrambled the log. To Hyperion, it looks like we went to T-Bone Junction. Now we have to go.”

Timothy nodded reluctantly. He knew she was right about the need to stay mobile, but she was also concerningly pale and trembling at the fingertips. Horror stories about the power of Eridium—the rare, dangerous substance that currently pumped through Angel’s veins—sprang to mind. He adjusted his cap so the brim shadowed his eyes and followed Angel out of the office building.

Triggerlock was a sleepy town somewhere between a run-down supply depot and an upscale bandit camp. Angel explained as they strolled down the street that it was a Pangolin supply depot, but not a very important one. 

They had only been walking for about five minutes before Angel became winded and started listing from side to side as she walks.

“Let’s rest for a bit,” Timothy suggested. Angel offered no resistance.

They found a cracked stone fountain with copper coins still rusting at the bottom and sat down on the edge.

“Where do we go from here?” Timothy asked. “Is there anywhere we can go where Handsome Jack won’t find us?”

“Hyperion is everywhere,” Angel told him solemnly. “But they’re not as everywhere as they used to be without me.” She looked down at her feet, not out of boredom or bashfulness, but fascination. She jumped down and ran her fingers over the dusty soil as if every mote of dust was a precious diamond.

“There is one place,” she continued, “a town called Hollow Point. Hyperion can’t track us there; even I found it hard to access the network. Also the locals are really bad at recognizing people from bounties because it’s so dark. Because it’s, you know, a cave.”

“Sounds good to me,” Timothy said. “How do we get there?”

Angel closed her eyes and sat there for a second, squatting on the dull earth. When she opened her eyes, they were tired. 

“There’s a train station near to it,” she said. “The nearest station to here is Prosperity Junction. It’s only an hour’s drive away, and I’m detecting a Catch-A-Ride near here.” 

She grunted and closed her eyes again, this time in pain. Timothy jumped down from the fountain and debated placing a hand on her shoulder. He decided against it, remembering how she had reacted to him grabbing her arm.

“Angel?” he asked tremulously. “Angel, are you okay?” 

“Yes,” she muttered, “yes, I’m fine. It’s just Eridium withdrawal. Should be over soon.”

“That Eridium’s dangerous stuff,” Timothy said. “I can’t believe Handsome Jack used it on you like that.”

She laughed humorlessly. 

“You obviously didn’t know him that well if you can’t believe it.”

She opened her eyes and stood up. The only signs of pain were her tightly clenched fists and the firm set to her jaw. 

“The Catch-A-Ride’s this way.” 

A diamond-shaped waypoint flickered to life on Timothy’s minimap. 

They barely saw anyone as they walked towards the Catch-A-Ride. They passed some workers in Pangolin uniforms loading crates onto a large truck, but that was about all. The workers nodded at them as they passed, seeing Angel’s Pangolin shirt. 

Finally, they reached the Catch-A-Ride. Before Timothy could even open his mouth to inform Angel that he didn’t have a valid Catch-A-Ride account that Hyperion couldn’t track, Angel placed her hand on the interface panel and the mechanic’s voice echoed tinnily, 

“Authorized user accepted. Enjoy your ride, and I left a T-Swift CD in the player, ha-ha!”

SANCTUARY

“Scooter!” Lilith yelled over to the mechanic who was only half paying attention to the story, “were you aware that these guys hacked your Catch-A-Ride?”

“Yeah, haha, I knew pretty much right after that,” he yelled back. “But don’t worry about it, Lily. It’s cool. We’re cool. We’re square. They took care of some things for me in New Haven.”

Lilith looked somewhat mollified. Scooter didn’t usually forgive people for hacking his machines.

TRIGGERLOCK

Angel looked up at Timothy as the runner digistructed.

“We’re not listening to that,” she told him. 

He nodded and climbed into the driver’s seat. Angel sat down beside him in the passenger seat.

“Have you ever driven one of these before?” he asked. 

“Remotely, but never actually.”

“I’ll teach you sometime,” he offered.

Angel smiled.

“I’d like that.”

Timothy started the runner and drove out of town.


	10. Road Trip to a Train Trip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neither of them have much experience dealing with skags. Both have a lot of experience dealing with pain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who's been reading this! Please give feedback in the comments; constructive criticism and story suggestions are always welcome.

“I’ve marked the route on your Heads-Up Display,” Angel told Timothy, just as the glowing line appeared superimposed over the dusty and cracked road. “It’s pretty much a straight shot from here, but you vault hunters get lost easily.”

“I have an excellent sense of direction!” he protested.

“I watched you on Elpis,” she reminded him. “Remember that time you got the entire team lost in Outlands Canyon? Janey had to literally walk you through the way to Pickle’s step by step.” 

Timothy laughed.

“Oh man, I remember that. Aurelia was so mad. I thought Athena would chew me out for that, but I guess she was too happy at the chance to talk to Janey to remember to yell at me. Wilhelm was in charge of the map after that.” His smile slipped a little. “I miss them. Even though that whole thing was a clusterfuck that I didn’t sign up for, and even though half of them were either evil or annoying, I still miss them.”

“Maybe you’ll see them again,” Angel told him. “I’d like to meet Athena in person. She seems cool.”

“She’s scary. I think I only saw her smile once.” He swerved a little too hard to dodge a pothole, and Angel grabbed his arm. “I don’t even know where she is these days.”

“Jack had me keep tabs on her,” Angel said. “She left Elpis for Pandora with Janey, then they went off the grid. I have no idea where they are now.” 

SANCTUARY

“Do you know where she is now?” Lilith asked.

“No,” Tim lied, making a mental note to leave some of the story out. It wasn’t important anyway. It was clear that Lilith was looking for revenge against all the Elpis vault hunters, and he didn’t want Athena to end up in her crosshairs because of him.

THE ROAD

“I guess that’s good, if even you couldn’t find her,” Timothy mused. “She got away from Hyperion and got to live happily ever after. That,” he realized, “or she’s dead.” 

Angel gently swatted his arm.

“She’s fine. I’ve seen her in action. It would take a lot more than an entire planet of bandits, hostile wildlife, and deadly environments to take out Athena.”

Timothy nodded.

“Yeah, you’re right. I guess I just—Oh my god!”

The “Oh my god” was in response to a skag that had been minding its own business in the middle of the road when Timothy hit at full speed. It flew up over their heads and latched onto the top of the runner, snarling in pain. Timothy slammed the brakes in a panic, and the skag flew off the top of the runner and slammed into the dirt. The skag roared pitifully as it died in the dust.

“Okay,” Timothy said, trying to sound calm. “Okay, just a skag. Nothing to worry about.”

More skags began galloping towards them from the surrounding wasteland. 

“Oh, no,” Timothy muttered.

“Drive!” Angel yelled. “Drive! Just go!” 

She pulled her gun and pointed it shakily at the skags, firing at them and missing almost every shot. Timothy pressed the gas pedal to the floor. Angel screamed. Timothy looked over to see a skag with its teeth in her right shoulder, its back legs hanging out of the side of the runner. She still hadn’t dropped her gun. Before Timothy could do anything, Angel pressed her left arm to its eye and a burst of light came out of her hand. The skag gave a horrific squeal and released her arm, crumpling onto the road and quickly fading to a speck in the rearview mirror as Timothy slammed the boost button.

“Angel!” 

Angel was breathing heavily and clutching her arm. Blood that seemed a little too purple was already trickling over her fingers and soaking her sleeve. 

“Just get us to Prosperity Junction,” she told him through gritted teeth. 

“Oh my god, Angel, your arm.”

“I’ll be fine. As long as I’m not back in that horrible satellite module, I’ll be fine. Being locked away for ten years really gave me some perspective, you know?”

“You’re bleeding, like, a lot.”

“Eyes on the road, Tim.”

“That’s a lot of blood. Oh god, you don’t have a shield! An unblocked skag bite, oh my god.”

“Tim! Eyes. On. The road. The only way we’ll get to Prosperity Junction and a med vendor is if we stay focused.”

“Right. Right.” Timothy muttered. “You know, you’re awfully calm about this.”  
“I’m actually not. I think I’m in shock,” Angel responded matter-of-factly. “I’ve never been hurt like this before. I’m in an ungodly amount of pain when you add the Eridium withdrawal.” 

“We need to do something about that!” Timothy yelled unnecessarily loudly. “Eridium withdrawal! I thought you said that wasn’t a big deal! And now you’re in shock!”

“It doesn’t matter,” Angel told him. “Anyway, everything hurts and it’s hard to stay conscious, so if we could get to a med vendor that would be great. I’m going to need some hardcore Anshin pills.”

“Okay,” Timothy said, trying to slow his breathing. “Okay, everything is fine.”

“Just calm down, stay focused.” Angel continued. “Talk to me like I’m totally okay.”

“How is staying calm so easy for you?” Timothy asked. 

Angel looked down at her lap.

“I’m not supposed to show emotion when I’m talking to other people,” she murmured. “I’m supposed to act like an AI. An AI that knows what she’s doing.”

Timothy nodded.

“Yeah, I haven’t been allowed to cry or do anything un-Jack-like in public for years.”

They drove in silence for a time. The conversation wasn’t in any way resolved, but neither of them knew what to say. It was harder to talk to Angel like this, Timothy thought, when he could practically feel the features of her controlling father’s face blazing on his skin. It was harder to talk to Tim like this, Angel thought, when she wasn’t sequestered behind the protective barrier of a screen. 

Finally, it was Timothy who broke the silence.

“Tell you what,” he declared to the desert air, making Angel start in her chair, “from now on, we don’t do what we’re supposed to do. We make our own rules.”

Angel looked up at him hopefully. 

“I don’t have to hack into things and look for information all the time?”

Timothy shrugged.

“You can start telling people to get their own car. Hell, you can kick me out of this runner if you want.” 

She grinned.

“I don’t have to pretend to be an AI on the ECHONet?”

“You can burst into the Helios servers yelling your life story to every employee with an ECHONet connection!”

“I can swear?”

“Of course you motherfucking can! Wait, you weren’t allowed to swear?”

Angel shook her head.

“That foul-mouthed asshole!” Timothy exclaimed, and Angel burst into laughter, albeit subdued from blood loss and trembling withdrawal. 

He could see the shivers and symptoms etched in her face, clear as day. He had seen it before in his curly-haired brother. It hadn’t been pretty. 

“And as for you,” Angel declared like a queen issuing a royal decree, “I hereby declare that you no longer have to pretend to be like Jack in any way, shape, or form. You can have and express normal emotions and have a favorite color that isn’t yellow.” 

She reached her left hand over to Timothy, and he shook it with one decisive movement.

“You know,” she remarked, “I almost forgot about the skag bite for a minute there.” 

Timothy decided this was as good a time as any to bring up the Eridium again.

“Listen, you’ve been exposed to Eridium, even injected with it, for years. And now you’re going cold turkey. There are bound to be,” he hesitated, trying to find the right word, before deciding on, “complications.”

“I’ll be fine,” Angel muttered, turning away from him. “I’ll deal with it. I’m good at dealing with things.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Timothy said, remembering how she’d taken care of that skag. “But you’re getting worse. I can see it. Your hands were shaking even before the skag bite.”

“We’re both in pretty bad shape,” she said. “If we start thinking about all our problems before we make it to safety in Hollow Point, we’ll never get there. We can’t dwell on anything. We just have to keep moving.”

“Wise words,” Timothy muttered to himself. “Good life advice, too. Just ignore what hurts.”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” Angel snapped harshly. She inhaled deeply. “Sorry.”

Timothy was about to respond when he spotted the billboard up ahead. He pointed, and Angel’s gaze followed his finger. She smiled.

“Only ten miles. I told you we’d make it.”


	11. In Which Angel Blows Things Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angel Blows Things Up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hoooo boy. So this is the last chapter I have fully finished, and school starts pretty soon. As such, chapter updates are gonna get a lot more irregular from this point, especially since I have a bunch of new fic ideas I want to start on. Stay tuned, though; there's no way I'm abandoning this baby.

Of course, the runner broke down just as they passed under the sign and/or makeshift gallows indicating they were entering city limits. Timothy suppressed the frustrated outburst that sprung to his tongue and helped Angel out of the passenger seat. They wouldn’t be needing the car anyway. The ground beneath their feet was sandy and light.

“Alright,” he said to himself, “if you were a med vendor, where would you be?”

“There’s the train station,” Angel told him, pointing unnecessarily to the large, official-looking facade that loomed over the ramshackle skyline. She winced and leaned against him with a muttered “‘m fine.”

Timothy raised an eyebrow and began walking briskly down the dirt-paved central boulevard with Angel by his side. As they walked, unsavory-looking characters peered at them from their windows. None emerged to harass them, likely due to the prohibitive heat. Timothy was used to it—his home planet, Janus-2, was tropical—and Angel had actually begun to shiver with cold, wrapping her coat around herself and huddling her arms close to her body. This was concerning. Timothy shoved it into the can of worms he was going to open when he caught a break. 

A flickering neon sign of a stylized syringe pointing into a small hut caught his eye. He pointed it out to Angel and her shoulders seemed to relax a little, despite the fact that one of them was currently bleeding a lot. They made a beeline for the med vendor hut. The word “Zed!” was sloppily painted above the metal door.

When they entered the hut, Timothy saw a med vendor, which was good, and a considerably large collection of injured bandits, which was not so good. 

“This is not so good,” he muttered to Angel.

“C’mon, you damn thing,” one of the bandits yelled in a husky voice, kicking the med machine, “WORK!” 

The bandit had one arm in a cast. The smell of blood and bile permeated the room.

“Just be polite,” Angel whispered to Timothy. “We don’t want to antagonize them. We’ll just get what we need and go. For all they know, we’re bandits too.”

“Excuse me,” Timothy said to the broken-armed bandit, “what seems to be the problem?” 

The bandit glanced over at them and their bloodied clothes and gestured to the machine.

“Fuckin’ thing’s broken. I put my money in and no hypo came out. We got wounded here and it just keeps spouting these damn one-liners.”

“Bleedin’ out? I can fix that!” the machine chirruped.

“Shut the fuck up,” the bandit told it. He shrugged. “Anyway, you two are welcome to try, it’ll just eat your cash.”

Angel walked up to the med machine and placed her hand against it. She closed her eyes.

“You won’t regret it,” the machine said, and an Anshin pill bottle clattered into the receptacle. 

“Fixed it,” she announced, grabbing the bottle. “Just a simple problem with the payment interface.” She saluted the assembled bandits. “You can buy what you need now.”

The bandits all greedily crowded the med machine, pushing and shoving to get their medicine. In the confusion, Timothy and Angel quietly retreated from the building.

“That went a lot better than I expected,” Timothy said as they continued towards the train station. “I thought I was gonna have to fight off the entire lot.” He looked down at her. “Er, you might want to be a bit less obvious with her powers.” 

Angel looked contrite.

“I’ll be more careful,” she promised. 

“Hey!”

They turned to see one of the bandits running towards them, still carrying an empty vial. 

“We need to go,” Timothy whispered to Angel. 

She shook her head imperceptibly.

“Let’s see what he wants,” she whispered back. “If we run, they’ll all come after us.”

Against Timothy’s better judgement, they waited for the bandit to catch up to them.

“Can I help you?” Angel asked.

“Yeah, you sure can,” the bandit replied, a bit out of breath. “Dunno how, but you fixed that med machine. We could use someone like you around here. We don’t really have mechanics or tech specialists here.”

Angel gave him a polite smile.

“Sorry, but we’re on our way out of town. I’d be happy to help if you have just one more quick thing you need fixed, but we need to be on the next train.”

“Perhaps I wasn’t quite clear,” the bandit said, and Timothy saw more bandits emerge from the surrounding buildings. “We need your help, whether you want to give it or not.”

“Alright,” Timothy announced, grabbing Angel’s wrist and striding with her towards the train station, “we’re going.”

The bandit pulled out a gun. 

“Darn,” Angel muttered. 

Timothy pulled out a gun.

“We’re getting on that train,” he told the bandit. “Stay out of our way.” 

The bandit started to fire. He was fast, but Timothy was faster. With lightning speed, he pushed the bandit’s arm up so the gun fired harmlessly into the sky and fired his own pistol seven times into the bandit’s stomach. The rat-a-tat of machine gun fire began coming from all directions.

“Run!” he yelled to Angel. She drew her pistol and began sprinting for the train station. Unfortunately, she had absolutely no instinct for the basic skill of running without getting shot, and a bullet grazed her non-bitten shoulder, forcing her to take cover behind an old moonshot container. Timothy ducked and wove in between barrels and food stands. He crouched down next to her against the cool metal. 

“Alright,” he muttered, “plan B.”

Timothy digistructed his rifle from his Backpack. He peered around the edge of the metal and swiftly put a hollow point bullet in a bandit’s head. He killed five more with deadly precision, but they just kept coming. Angel popped open the pill bottle and swallowed five pills dry. She started shooting at any bandit that came close, but her shoulders hadn’t healed yet and each pull of the trigger sent shockwaves of pain across her back. The typical Anshin nausea hit her next, and she bit down on her lip so hard it started to bleed. 

“Plan C,” Timothy decided, pulling out the SMG as the bandits approached. The gunfire echoed through the formerly sleepy streets and blood spattered over the ramshackle walls. 

“Do you have a plan D?” Angel asked anxiously as another bandit fell with a scream only to be replaced by three more. The horde of bandits was almost at the container now.

“Er, no,” he told her. “I, ah, don’t really plan things? Much?”

“Um, okay,” she said. “Okay. Use your doppleganger as a distraction on my signal. We’ll run into that clothing store,” she pointed to a rather suspicious-looking building behind them, “and out the back. While we’re in there, we’ll wrap some local clothes around ourselves to confuse them. Then we run to the train station. But we have to be quick.” 

“You sure this is a good idea?”

“Someone’s gotta have a plan D.”

“Fair point. Okay. Tell me when.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. 

“This is crazy,” she muttered. She opened her eyes. “Okay, go.”

Timothy activated his doppleganger.

“Hello, cupcakes!” the hologram said cheerily, rushing into the crowd of bandits while firing a digitized shotgun. “Get ready for some bullets!”

Timothy and Angel dashed for the building. They banged through the rickety door and rushed through the aisles, pulling suspicious-smelling clothes off the shelves as they went. Angel took a bandit mask off a hat rack and shoved it on, and Timothy tied a bandanna around the lower half of his face. This was met with a halfhearted “hey!” from the impossibly aged and decrepit cashier, who subsequently returned to staring blankly at the counter as if to say, “yeah, same shit as always.” Obviously a good strategy. People rarely grew old on Pandora.

Angel shoved open the back door, leading Timothy onto the dusty street. She looked both ways, saw no bandits, and stepped out onto the dirt-covered stones. 

“Walk” she told him, “don’t run.” 

It was torture. With every too-slow step Timothy felt as though he was waving a neon sign saying, “hey! Come put a bullet in my face!” 

It worked, though. A bandit even ran through the cross street ahead of them, yelling “where are those bastards,” but barely spared them a glance.

“It is really easy to lose bandits here,” Timothy remarked. Angel shrugged.

“The train’s about two minutes away from the station,” she told him. “Just keep walking.”

He didn’t ask her how she knew how close the train was.

They kept walking. They kept walking to the train station. They entered the station. The train pulled in. And the bandits began pouring in from every direction. They yelled, whooped, and waved bloody cleavers, screaming for blood. At this point, they had probably forgotten their original motive for chasing them down.

Timothy inwardly cursed his luck.

“Oh no,” Timothy said. He looked down at Angel. “Er, what’s plan E?”

Angel’s face was a jumble of fear. Her wide eyes shone with tears. Her tattoos shone in a pulsing pattern through her clothes.

“I’m scared,” she whispered, “I-I can’t control—,” and the air shattered with a cataclysmic explosion of sound and light and one of the walls buckled inward. 

It took Timothy a moment to realize it was an explosion coming from just outside town. The bandits yelled and covered their ears, dashing out of the station to investigate the noise. 

SANCTUARY

“Why the hell did you do that?” Lilith demanded. “You knew there were houses near that Hyperion gas silo. You knew people would die.”

“The people in question had just been trying to kill us,” Angel told her. “It was them or us. I chose us. That’s how it works on Pandora.”

“How would you know? It was your first day on Pandora!” Lilith said.

“Everything I knew at that point about life on Pandora,” Angel replied, “I knew from watching you.”

PROSPERITY JUNCTION

“What was that?” Timothy asked, but he couldn’t even hear his voice over the ringing in his ears. Even the noise cancellers built into his HUD hadn’t protected him. He looked at Angel, but she wasn’t where she had been a moment before. He looked down to find her passed out on the wooden planks. He didn’t blame her.

Timothy picked her up and ran into the train just as it began to move, ignoring the ticket agent’s yells. There were no other people in the compartment—train travel was barely ever used on Pandora except to transport goods. He laid Angel down on a row of seats and sat down on the bench seat across the aisle. He took his first relaxed, deep breath of the day. 

He was free.


	12. Underground and Undercover

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Timothy and Angel find somewhere to hide, at least for a little bit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, yes. It's been a while. Everyone knows.  
> I wasn't planning to continue this. Especially now. The winter has stifled my creativity. But I found this chapter deep in my folders and decided to brush it up and post it! I hope y'all like it.

Angel didn’t open her eyes as soon as she woke up. 

She took a moment of rest on the cracked leather booth seat of the train, mind drifting in between dream and reality, before opening her eyes just a sliver to gaze at the man across the aisle. He was fidgeting, looking around him as if expecting Hyperion soldiers to jump out of the woodwork at any moment. His bone structure and body were those of Jack, but his irregular knife scars and nervous mannerisms betrayed him as a double and made him far easier for Angel to look at. She kept watching him through slitted eyelids, not stirring even as he looked her way, clearly expecting her to wake up. 

Angel had learned over the years that people acted like their true selves when they didn’t think anyone was watching. She had gained a lot of intelligence—mostly an encyclopedia of ugly personal truths—through being an unseen listener, a spy in the wires. But Timothy Lawrence was a tough nut to crack. Not only was he trained—indeed, contractually obliged—to keep every personal thought close to his chest, the only open conversations he ever had were with her. He was watched all the time, and he knew it, so for all she knew the Timothy Lawrence she knew could be as much of a figurative mask as the literal one he had worn just hours prior. 

Until she peeled his mask back, Angel couldn’t let hers slip. 

She gave a weak moan and stirred on the booth. Immediately, Tim rushed over to her side.

“Angel,” he asked anxiously, “are you awake? Are you okay?”

“M’fine,” she muttered, and watched as tension visibly left his shoulders. 

“Oh, thank god,” he breathed. “You’ve passed out quite a lot in the past twenty-four hours. Probably a bit too much. We’re almost at Hollow Point, by the way. Just another ten minutes .”

“How long was I out?” Angel asked, pushing herself into a sitting position on the booth and shoving the bandit mask up off her face and onto her forehead. The sunhat fell off her head and onto the floor. Tim picked it up and handed it to her. His bandana was looped around his neck. Just the thought of something around her neck made Angel feel like she couldn’t breathe.

“About half an hour,” Tim told her. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes,” Angel told him. “I’m fine. One good night’s sleep should fix quite a bit.” She stretched her arms up over her head, relishing in the pull in her lower back. She had been cramped for quite a while. “It has been a crazy day, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Tim said in more of a nervous exhalation than a word. He sat down on the booth next to her. “I’m glad you’re okay.” He laughed. “Hard to believe we actually managed to get out…it feels like a dream. I’m afraid they’ll come for us any moment.”

He was fidgety, nervous, and a bit of a dork. It was easy to trust the man who sat beside her, the man with the scars and the twitchy fingers. But those twitchy fingers were still as stone on a trigger. She had seen him kill, and she had seen his remorse dwindle over the years, and she had watched him give up his life for cash. Angel had seen the bounty already on her head for her return to Hyperion alive. Her only hope was that he wasn’t an idiot enough to try to collect it. Handsome Jack would skin him with his own teeth. 

He wore a shock-resistant shield with a dual arc core clipped to his belt, well within Angel’s reach. Just in case.

“What’s the plan once we get there?” she asked. 

“Well,” he began tentatively, still an intern at heart, “I was thinking we could start with a nap at some hotel. Then food. I never thought I’d say this, but skag burgers sound delicious.”

Angel nodded.

“Sounds good. I’ve never had a skag burger.”

“Then,” he continued, “we can discuss next steps.”

He said “next steps” like it was a new vocabulary word in a foreign and esoteric language. Angel supposed a twenty-year plan of soulless servitude left little room for next steps. Not to mention a guy who sold his soul to pay off college loans probably wasn’t the best at planning. All the next steps in the escape plan had been left to Angel.

Angel leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

It had worked.

It really shouldn’t have; for all her outward confidence and soothing words, she wasn’t one for self-deception, and she knew damn well that the escape plot was the last-ditch effort of a scared and desperate girl. But the involved parties had exceeded her expectations. Even their confrontation with Handsome Jack had only ended with two easily fixable bullet wounds to Tim’s stomach. 

And now she was free.

Freedom was a notion she had never been familiar with. Now a literal world of possibilities was laid out at her feet. It scared her shitless. It was like standing at the edge of a cliff about to jump but knowing that, if she tried hard enough, she could fly. 

“We’re pulling into the station now,” Tim told her. 

The train screeched to a halt concerningly loudly. The locomotive sounded like it was about to fall apart at the rivets. It probably was. Pandora itself was about to fall apart at the rivets. Ironically, the only buildings on Pandora up to code belonged to Hyperion.

“Okay,” Angel said as they stood up, “if anyone asks, you’re my brother. We’re traveling archeologists that got run off our dig site by Hyperion.”

Being screwed over by Hyperion was a sure way to get allies on Pandora. Timothy could certainly pass for her father, but just the thought of pretending he was her father—that he was Jack—and she was willingly traveling with him twisted her stomach. So, siblings. 

“I always wanted a little sister,” Tim told her with a smile that she returned with her mouth but not her eyes. 

Her research had told her that siblings were close, that they trusted each other. She didn’t have any context in which to put that notion.

The station was nothing more than a rickety wooden platform with a ticket booth off to the side. The station, and indeed the surrounding wasteland, looked completely abandoned. Other than the station, the only sign of civilization was a dusty sign in the shape of an arrow pointing into a tunnel in the side of the great grey looming mountain that contained the town of Hollow Point. Their destination. 

“We’ll have to watch out for cars,” Angel warned him as they started walking farther and farther into the cave. “Stay right.”

Tim glanced around nervously and practically pressed himself against the cave wall. Angel laughed.

“We’ll hear them long before they get to us. Cave, remember? There will be a considerable echo.”

“I’ve been hit by a car before,” Tim grumbled. “Not taking chances.”

Angel shrugged. No doubt, she had somehow seen him get hit by that moon buggy. On Elpis, Jack seemed to know every move of theirs as soon as they made it, even when they weren’t transmitting. Now Timothy knew how.

“So,” she asked, “what’s up with that doppleganger? You seem reluctant to use it.” 

He sighed.

“I miss my old digi-jacks. This one’s practically an AI of Handsome Jack. I keep thinking it’s gaining intelligence. Now that I’ve ditched Hyperion, it’s bound to kill me.”

He was right. In fact, Angel was moderately surprised the piece of Hyperion tech hadn’t tried to kill him back at Prosperity Junction. The only reason she had even suggested letting it out of its watch was because she knew she could disable it with a snap of her fingers. 

“I’d better take a look at it when we find someplace to rest,” she said. “We may have to ditch it.” 

“Good riddance,” Tim muttered. “I’m not even sure how I would kill it if I had to.” 

As he said that, they came to the end of the tunnel. Angel gave a little gasp at the sight of the lit buildings spread before them, nestled in the cave like eggs in a nest. It was beautiful. Back in her quarters, she had a gift from Earth, mammoth ivory carved into a cityscape. Hollow Point was like that, but stone and life-sized.

“Okay,” Tim said, seemingly unfazed, “I guess we just walk in and see what we can find. I have cash, but it won’t last us long.”

“I can get us more once we need it.” She pulled her mask down over her face. “Masks on.” Timothy nodded and pulled the red bandana back over his nose.

They walked into Hollow Point along the dusty path that turned into a cobblestone street. The town’s buildings were not nearly as pretty up close as they had been from a distance. They were haphazard and ramshackle, leaning on each other like drunk friends leaving a bar. But they were preferable to strict and clean corporate lines, black and grey honeycombs, yellow logos and square hedges. Pandora was a land of anarchy: the ultimate freedom, at least for those who could take care of themselves. 

“There’s something,” Angel said, pointing to a neon sign advertising Sal’s B&B. The lit arrow pointed at a closed metal door with suspicious small holes in it. She shrugged and pushed it open.

The lobby of Sal’s B&B was really just a living room with a reception desk. Ratty couches tried and failed to lend an air of hospitality to the dismal place. The second B was represented by a rather pitiful-looking continental breakfast bar. 

“We just need the room for a few hours,” Angel whispered to Tim, “enough to take a nap.” He nodded and approached the one-armed man at reception. 

“Two beds, please,” he asked. “Just for a day.” 

Their hotel room was on the second floor, room 205. Angel threw the door open and immediately collapsed on the closest bed, disregarding its high likelihood of fleas. She closed her eyes, trusting that Tim wouldn’t betray his ace up his sleeve. Without her, he had no hope of escaping Hyperion. Within minutes, she was fast asleep. 

Timothy knew one of them should probably stay awake, but exhaustion hammered at the inside of his skull, and the aches that adrenaline had pushed from his body were coming back with a vengeance. 

I’ll just close my eyes for a few minutes, he decided. I’m no use to Angel if I’m so tired I can barely stand. 

When he opened his eyes after what felt like ten minutes, his watch told him it had been two hours. 

“Shit,” he muttered, whipping his head around to look at the other bed. Angel was, unsurprisingly, still asleep. He exhaled and threw an arm over his eyes. His stomach hurt like a bitch and his legs were sore as hell. He couldn’t even imagine how Angel must have been feeling. After all, she’d been thrown from a life of confinement and inactivity into Pandora. After Eridium withdrawal, two skag bites, and overuse of her powers to the point of unconsciousness, not to mention all the running, Timothy could only assume she was in a world of pain. 

Angel slept for another hour, during which Timothy busied himself with his ECHO. He started with a quick search of Hollow Point restaurants. Apparently, a place called the Purple Skag was the only place that truly adhered to health inspections, even if the proprietor shot those who didn’t pay their tabs. The menu advertised skag burgers and fries.

Sure enough, Hyperion had put out two top-priority bounties for him and Angel. Surprisingly, both of them were wanted alive. Timothy had assumed Handsome Jack would want him shot on sight. But of course the madman would want to torture Timothy to death himself. 

Torture awaited them both back on Hyperion. Timothy had seen the light in Angel’s eyes at being free, even despite all her wounds. Just thinking about her being returned to her life of servitude broke his heart. 

Angel’s bounty gave a description of her appearance, but left out that she was a Siren. Of course Handsome Jack wouldn’t want anyone knowing about that. 

Timothy’s bounty merely advertised him as a doppleganger without the mask traveling with Angel. Handsome Jack’s body doubles were a poorly kept secret. Timothy hoped fervently that the receptionist downstairs hadn’t looked past their bandit attire. His hair was rather distinctive. With that thought, Timothy headed into the bathroom. A small placard advertised public showers down the hall. He looked in the mirror with distaste. His hair was still gelled in a rakish coif, albeit a tad disheveled from the day’s events. He ran his hands through his hair feverishly, attempting to mess it up. It took copious amounts of water, several broken comb teeth, and lots of muttered swear words before he finally got his hair to lay naturally and messy. Handsome Jack, and therefore Timothy, had naturally wavy, almost curly, hair that Handsome Jack wouldn’t be seen dead with. Once all the gel was out, Timothy’s hair curled like a cloud around his ears. 

“What are you doing?”

Timothy whipped around with a muffled shriek of surprise. He was on edge.

“Jesus, Angel! You scared me!”

“Sorry,” she muttered. She gave Timothy a searching look. “He sure is vain about his hair. You look a lot less like him now.”

“Yeah, that was the idea.”

Angel joined him in front of the mirror, thoughtfully gazing at her own reflection. She pushed her bangs behind her ear. Her black hair came to her shoulders, a small change from the picture on the bounty where she still had her ponytail in. Timothy had almost been expecting the eye hidden behind her hair to be green like her father’s, but instead both her eyes were the same piercing, clear blue. It wasn’t even the same shade as Jack’s blue eye. She must have gotten her eyes from her mother.

“I should cut my hair sometime,” she mused. “It’ll help the shaved part catch up, anyway.” Her stomach growled. “You mentioned skag burgers? I haven’t eaten in a day.”

“Place called the Purple Skag a few blocks away. We need food before we do anything else.”

“I’ll eat to that,” Angel joked with a little smile. Her smile was just a little quirk at the corners of her mouth. It looked rusty, but genuine.

“Did you get enough sleep?” Timothy asked. Angel nodded.

“It’s as much as I’m going to be able to get right now, anyway.” She sighed and brushed a rogue lock of hair out of her face. “Withdrawal sucks.” She said it in such a matter-of-fact way she may as well have been talking about the weather.

Timothy opened the cupboard behind the mirror—it was full of mold stains, quite an achievement considering Pandora’s lack of moisture—and found a pair of scissors.

“I can cut your hair for you,” he offered, “if you like.”

She looked up at him, clearly a little skeptical.

“I worked as a hairdresser’s assistant for a while during college,” he added. “I picked up a few things.”

“Okay,” she said, hoisting herself up to sit on the edge of the sink, “go ahead.” She shrugged off her coat and tossed it out of the bathroom.

He started off by cutting off her ponytail. He continued by cutting her hair right under the ear. It was a bit hard, as she had inherited her father’s hair texture, and once the weight was cut off it sprung up and fluffed around her cheeks. He tried to stay away from her neck. He didn’t miss the way her breath caught every time something brushed it, or how she tensed at having him near her with a sharp object. Timothy was beginning to suspect that Eridium and isolation hadn’t been the only ways Jack had hurt her.

“My dad used to do my hair,” she said quietly. “He’d braid it every morning.” She said “my dad” so much differently than she did “Handsome Jack.” She said “my dad” like the name of a dead loved one. And perhaps, to her, he was. She brushed her fingers along the back of her neck, where Timothy had cut the hair away. Black locks dusted the sink and floor. “It feels nice to finally cut it off. I’ve wanted to for a while, but he wouldn’t let me. Figures. He’s had the same hair for a decade.”

“Did your dad always gel the living daylights out of his hair?” Timothy asked. Angel giggled.

“No,” she responded. “Until I was about eight, he just let it loose. A lot of the other Hyperion employees made fun of him for his curls, but he said it was worth it to watch me run my fingers through them.”

“That sounds nothing like Handsome Jack,” Timothy remarked.

“It’s not,” Angel said, her voice at least ten shades colder. “The man who was my dad died a long time ago. Handsome Jack is just my father.”

“God, I hate that guy,” Timothy said quietly.

“I think we’ve both said that.”

“It bears repeating.”

“True.”

Timothy continued to trim along the base of her skull, brushing the hair off her neck as he went. 

Finally, he was done. He stepped back and admired his handiwork. “What do you think?”

Angel looked in the mirror and grinned. Her hair now hung in a voluminous bob around her face and over her left eye, making her face look almost a completely different shape from her picture in the bounty.

“I love it, Tim,” she said softly. “Thank you.”

“Ready for burgers?” he asked.

“Yes, please!” she said cheerily.

 

The Purple Skag was a disreputable-looking establishment decked out in purple neon and wanted posters. Timothy was glad to see that his and Angel’s bounties had not yet reached the bulletin board by the door. Only a matter of time. But the only thing more dangerous than staying was moving; Hyperion had a monopoly on nearly every Pandoran mode of transportation.

The inside was no more savory than the outside, but it was well-lit and looked fairly clean. They settled in at the table nearest the back door, so they could bolt away if necessary. 

“I’ll go get us some burgers,” Timothy offered. Angel nodded and absentmindedly ran her hands through her newly short hair. 

Timothy hesitantly approached the blond bartender. He looked about 19, with spiky hair and the beginnings of a beard on his acne-pocked cheeks. 

“You’re new in town,” he said abruptly before Timothy could even place an order.

“Er, yeah,” Timothy replied. He took a deep breath and reminded himself to adopt a Pandoran demeanor. “What’s it to ya?”

“Well, there’s no need to be rude,” the bartender said. “Just trying to make conversation.” 

“Sorry,” Timothy muttered. “You have skag burgers, right?”

“How many?”

“Just two. And, uh, some drake fruit juice, if you have it.”

The bartender raised an eyebrow.

“You do realize that this is a bar.”

Timothy folded his arms. The bartender sighed.

“Two burgers and two glasses of juice, coming right up.”

Timothy returned to the table. Angel was examining every patron in turn, chewing her lip as she did so. 

“Don’t look so nervous,” Timothy hissed. “They’ll know something’s up.”

“Sorry,” Angel muttered, looking down at her lap. 

Right as she did so, the door opened, and a pair of women entered the bar. A couple. One blonde, one dark-haired, and—oh shit.

One smiling and laughing, one scowling and scanning the room with her hand on a sword. One wearing a crop top and vest, one wearing practical military cargo pants and some light armor.

One semi-friendly junk dealer and one assassin that would probably kill him.

Timothy quickly turned his face away from the door. He should have known Athena and Janey would be here at this safe haven. A new danger. 

“Athena and Janey” Angel breathed. “They can help us! This is great.”

“Keep your head down,” Timothy hissed. 

“I thought you guys were friends” Angel whispered with a frown. Timothy shook his head.

“I’m fairly sure she hates me after I chose to stay with Jack. And she, ah, isn’t very forgiving.”

Angel leaned back in her chair and gave him a searching gaze, but said nothing. It was worse that way, when he could only guess at the judgement racing through her mind. 

Timothy exhaled and put his head in his hands, wishing for the umpteenth time that he had gone with Athena, that they had been on good terms as Jack went mad. With Angel’s genius and power, she could easily have found someone else to help break her out.

Timothy had messed everything up on Eleseer.

ELESEER

“Athena!” Timothy called as she strode away. “Athena, wait!”

He caught up with her just outside the Vault of the Sentinel, sword in hand, looking shaken. He had never seen her look shaken, so this alone told him something was seriously wrong.

“Where are you going?” he demanded. “We have to get Jack to a doctor, and get our reward, and—“

“And serve a bloodthirsty psychopath?” she interrupted coldly. “No. I’ve had enough of these company men to last a lifetime. I’m making my choice, Timothy. Time to make yours.” She gave him another look, this one with perhaps a hint of pity in her eyes. “I’m going back to Pandora. Come with me. You know nothing good will come from Jack.”

“But—but my contract,” Timothy stuttered. “I can’t leave. He’ll kill me.” And there was that unspoken admission, the fact that Jack was long gone. Something else had taken his place, something dark, something that maybe had always been there.

“He’ll kill you if you stay!” Athena yelled. “Don’t you get it? You’re a good man. He never has been. This is your last chance to walk away.”

He knew she was right. He knew that, as much as she tried not to, Athena cared about him, and that was why she was warning him. Warning him of a pattern she had seen before. But he was too much of a coward.

He didn’t move. Athena gave him a sad look, and he knew that they left that Vault enemies. 

He stayed, and he suffered for it.

THE PURPLE SKAG

“Got your burgers!” the bartender yelled at them, placing two plates and two glasses on the bar.

“I got it,” Angel said quickly, seemingly sensing that Timothy was glued to his chair in fear. 

As she retrieved the food, Timothy had to constantly remind himself not to look up, not to show his face, not to betray the anxious energy that suffused his whole body. He worried that Athena could sense him. Maybe she could smell the cowardice that rolled off him in waves.

He spared a glance. Athena and Janey had settled into a booth far too close for comfort. 

Janey leaned across the table and casually brushed Athena’s hand with hers. Athena caught it and rubbed it with her thumb. A small gesture, but coming from Athena it was a clear indicator of a relationship. A committed one. Athena didn’t smile, but she seemed relaxed. She had never seemed relaxed on Elpis. 

Timothy was happy for them, but he wished they’d leave. Hollow Point had been a bad idea after all. 

Angel sat back down with the burgers and juice. 

“Can’t you just talk to them?” she asked. “I mean, you guys fought together on Elpis. I think you were the closest thing Athena had to a friend besides Janey, and Janey was always nice to you. You were scared, and besides, you’re away from Hyperion now. I’m sure they can forgive you.”

But even she didn’t sound sure, like she was trying to reassure herself of the power of forgiveness.

“I just wanna eat my burger,” Timothy responded. And he did, indeed, eat his burger, and Angel ate her burger, and they were delicious burgers.

“This is delicious,” Angel exclaimed as a bit of sauce dribbled down her chin. “Better than any Hyperion food, anyway!”

Timothy made a noise of affirmation through his food-filled mouth. It was certainly better than the roasted torks him and the Elpis crew had been reduced to eating. He tried not to think about how the animal they were eating had been trying to eat them not too long ago.

If trying not to think about things were an Olympic sport, Timothy Lawrence would win gold every year.

But here was another thing he had to think about. Athena. Who had just glanced over at their table, her brow furrowed in almost—recognition.

Timothy quickly turned his face away. Everything was going to be fine. They just had to find somewhere safe.

And that’s when the full weight of what he’d done hit Timothy like a ton of bricks. There was nowhere safe. There was nowhere on the planet they could go where Handsome Jack wouldn’t find them.

Timothy took another bite of his burger. They needed to go somewhere Hyperion wouldn’t follow. 

Or they needed to make sure there was no Handsome Jack to follow them.


End file.
